microagent quarantine

Last updated: 2026-06-27

microagent quarantine <name> [--state-dir <dir>]

quarantine severs a workspace’s host-side network and mediation while preserving disk state, identity, runtime state files, serial logs, and events.json, and records the state as quarantined. It is the containment verb, not a shutdown: halt parks a healthy workspace and stop signals the VM to exit, but quarantine leaves the VM process where it is and cuts its ability to affect anything outside the boundary. A quarantined workspace is a forensic state - you must halt, stop, or kill it before you can start it again.

Quarantine removes host-side network paths, mediation listeners, published TCP listeners, and console input where they exist. New connections fail closed. The VM process may still be alive, and the recorded runtime PID is preserved in state so you can inspect what happened before taking it down.

Examples

Quarantine a workspace, inspect it, then take it down:

microagent quarantine research
microagent status research
microagent kill research

Flags

You’ll rarely need flags here - --state-dir only when the workspace lives outside the default ~/.microagent/.

Flag	Description
--name <name>	Workspace name; positional name is also accepted
--id <id>	Workspace ID alias for --name
--state-dir <dir>	State directory (default ~/.microagent/)
--backend <name>	Backend identity override
--supervisor <path>	Override the installed host backend supervisor path

See global flags for --json/--text/--output/--mode/--supervisor.

Exit status

quarantine exits 0 when the host-side effects are severed and the state is recorded; nonzero when the workspace cannot be found or the backend cannot sever its host-side effects. In AX mode a failure is written as a structured error envelope.

Related

• halt - park a healthy workspace instead
• stop - signal the VM to shut down
• kill - force-terminate a quarantined VM
• status - confirm the quarantined state
• State and identity - where quarantined sits in the lifecycle