Codex CLI starts a self-updating background daemon by default, users report

The reporter, running Codex CLI 0.157.0 installed with npm on Linux (WSL2), says that opening an interactive session starts a daemon (codex app-server --managed-daemon) with no terminal attached. They report it keeps running after every Codex window is closed, until it is stopped by hand or the machine reboots. They also report that it copies the whole platform package, about 374 MB, into ~/.codex/packages/app-server-daemon/releases/<version>/ and runs from that copy, so the backend's version is no longer tied to the version the package manager installed.

Two further claims matter for automated setups. The reporter says a detached updater checks for new releases five minutes after start and then hourly, and restarts the backend when it finds one. They also say the daemon keeps the environment of whichever session started it: their wrapper sets HTTPS_PROXY per invocation, and later sessions still went out through the first session's proxy. A third claim is that codex app-server daemon stop leaves the updater process running.

Other users in the thread report the same behavior. One confirms it on Windows 10 LTSC with 0.157.0 and says setting daemon_auto_start = false in config.toml resolves it. The reporter's workaround is codex features disable daemon_auto_start. The issue had 67 thumbs-up reactions when we read it. We saw no comment from an OpenAI maintainer. A commit titled "codex: disable daemon auto-start by default" is linked from the thread under another user's name; we could not find it in OpenAI's repository, so we do not know whether the default has changed.

The restart behavior has its own report. Issue #40969, opened by yazzaoui, describes an unattended auto-update on August 26 (0.149.0 to 0.150.0) on a host with 13 long-lived threads whose turns ran Go build and test suites for 3 to 30 minutes. The reporter says the daemon gives the server's graceful drain 60 seconds and then sends SIGKILL, ending in-flight turns on every thread. That issue cites source locations in rust-v0.150.0, and a second commenter said on August 27 that those references still held against main. It was open when we read it. It describes a daemon started with codex remote-control start, not the 0.157.0 default.

Hacker News carried the issue at 211 points and 125 comments about an hour after posting, as of 16:00 ET on October 12.

Why it matters: If your factory runs Codex on shared or unattended hosts, check for the daemon and set daemon_auto_start to false until the default is settled. The reports describe a process that can restart mid-run on a schedule you did not set, and that keeps the first session's proxy settings for later ones. Both are claims from users, and OpenAI has not responded in the threads we read.