Hermes Community Reports Desktop and Docker Version Mismatch, Update May Prevent Remote Conversations

On October 2, the Hermes Agent community reported that a Windows desktop client connected to a Docker backend on a NAS could no longer create new conversations after the desktop app was updated. The case involved Desktop 0.21.5+4856 and a container image at version 0.21.5. The reporter said existing conversations and Telegram still worked, with the failure limited to creating new remote sessions. Issue report

The report says the new desktop client adds cwd_explicit to session.create requests. The older backend’s parameter structure forbids additional fields, so it rejects the request outright. This turns a UI update into an RPC compatibility problem: even if a new field carries only auxiliary information, a receiver with strict validation may treat the entire call as invalid. This is currently a single deployment case; the full range of affected versions and platforms has not been confirmed. Error and reproduction steps

The official documentation provides context on the update paths. A standard hermes update fetches the latest code from main. Docker installations, by contrast, use image source tags to identify how they are managed, refuse direct changes to the application inside the container, and require users to pull and replace the image. The two sides can therefore be on different commits; seeing that an update completed in both interfaces is not enough to establish protocol compatibility. Update documentation

The multi-connection desktop documentation also says that bulk updates handle each backend separately: externally managed installations such as Docker and Nix can refuse an update, while the desktop app updates last. In light of this report, deployment workflows need to account for the compatibility boundary where a backend refuses an update but the client still upgrades. The documentation does not establish that all such combinations will fail. Multi-instance update mechanism

Engineering teams should record the desktop commit, container version, and image source, and test the creation of a new remote conversation during upgrade acceptance. The reporter proposed protocol version negotiation, omitting fields based on backend capabilities, and desktop update channels that match image versions. As of the time of review, the issue remained open and the page listed no linked fix; these proposals should not be treated as released solutions. Issue status and proposals