07 — Operate

Verify the install

Confirm every container is healthy and the Manager is reachable.

List running containers

costaff status
# or raw docker:
docker ps --format 'table {{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Ports}}'

You should see, at minimum:

costaff-postgres
costaff-mcp-costaff — the Manager's MCP server
costaff-agent-costaff — the Manager itself, bound to 0.0.0.0:18080
One costaff-agent-<name> and one costaff-mcp-<name> per registered specialist
One costaff-channel-<name> per registered channel

Health endpoints

# Manager Agent (ADK web server) — any non-5xx means it's up
curl -I http://localhost:18080/

# Specialist agents and channels expose an A2A agent card on their
# auto-assigned port (see `costaff agent list` / `costaff channel list`)
curl http://localhost:<port>/.well-known/agent-card.json
# → agent card JSON

costaff agent list and costaff channel list run these same health checks for you and print a per-row result.

Open the chat UI

Browse to your WebChat channel's port (shown in costaff channel list; http://localhost:18090 if it was the first channel you added), log in with the email + password you set at deploy, and start a conversation. The Manager routes your message to the right specialist agent and streams its progress back.

Alternatively, costaff dashboard opens the operator dashboard at http://localhost:8501 — the Chat tab talks to the Manager with no channel at all.

"Your account has not been approved"

The first message from any chat surface creates a pending identity, and the assistant refuses real work until it's approved (on by default). Fix: dashboard → Users → approve the new row → send your message again.

Finding your way around the dashboard

The left sidebar of the dashboard, in the order a new operator needs them:

Module	What you do there
Chat	Talk to the Manager directly — no channel needed.
Users	Approve new identities (the gate above), edit per-user profiles.
Channels	Add or swap Telegram / Discord / LINE bot tokens without restarting.
Agents	Health of every specialist; per-agent MCP / API / skill assignment.
Reminders / Tasks	Everything the assistant has scheduled, and recurring-task history.
Sessions	Browse past conversations with full tool-call traces.
Logs	Live container logs from any service — first stop when something misbehaves.
Config	Model provider, approval-gate toggle, theme.

Run the doctor

For a one-shot diagnostic that checks all of the above plus environment variables:

costaff doctor

It validates containers, network, .env, and the database, ends with a Suggested fixes list (each detected problem paired with the command that fixes it), and saves a timestamped report — the easiest output to share when you ask for help.