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microagent stop

Last updated: 2026-06-27

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

stop asks a workspace to shut down gracefully. If the VM hasn’t exited after five seconds, stop marks the workspace failed and returns an error. It never escalates on its own; follow up with kill when you need a hard termination. When you’re parking a healthy workspace to start again later, prefer halt, which records the clean halted state.

Stop a workspace:

Terminal window
microagent stop research

If the VM doesn’t shut down within the deadline, force it:

Terminal window
microagent kill research

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

FlagDescription
--name <name>Workspace name; positional name is also accepted
--id <id>Workspace ID alias for --name
--state-dir <dir>State directory holding the workspace record (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.

stop exits 0 on success; nonzero when the workspace cannot be found or when the VM does not exit within the five-second deadline (the workspace is then marked failed). In AX mode a failure is written as a structured error envelope.

  • halt - park a healthy workspace cleanly
  • kill - force-terminate when stop can’t
  • delete - remove the workspace entirely
  • status - confirm the resulting state