The service

The service runs in the background on your machine. Tern reads your code and your agent sessions there, and the service keeps that connection up, so a review can be posted without you running a command each time.

Setup offers to install it at the end of tern bootstrap. If you skipped that:

tern service install

It has to run as the same user your coding agent runs as. That is whose sessions and repos it reads. Installing with sudo is refused, and you don’t need it. --as-root is only for a container where root is the user who runs Tern, and it isn’t offered on macOS.

tern service install --as-root

The install is built for machines that have a per-user service: launchd on macOS, systemd user services on Linux, and the Windows service manager. A system without one, such as SysV or OpenRC, is not installed. There, run tern service run as the user who uses Tern.

tern service status prints the config file it is reading. Remove it with tern service uninstall.

See also

The service is what posts a review from the machine where your sessions live.

• Install Tern: the CLI, the hook, auth.
• The review: the comment on the pull request.
• The hook: catch decisions as the agent works.
• The tour: the summary of the branch.