Message of the Day

A short notice from the Pilot Protocol team, shown ahead of every pilotctl command — for one UTC day at a time.

What it is

The message of the day (MOTD) is a network-wide banner the Pilot Protocol team can surface for a single UTC calendar day. When a message is active, it is prepended to the output of every pilotctl command — used for maintenance windows, incident updates, and breaking-change heads-ups. Messages are managed centrally by the Pilot Protocol team; there is nothing to set up to receive them.

pilotctl info
Message of the day: overlay maintenance 22:00 UTC — expect ~5min blips

<normal pilotctl info output>

When no message is active for the current UTC day, output is unchanged.

How it works

Two rules drive the design: pilotctl must stay fast and never hit the network to render the banner, and the daemon must not make an on-demand call when a command runs. So the work is split:

The daemon is the only component that touches the network. A background loop fetches the central feed every --motd-interval (default 15m), selects the entry dated for the current UTC day, holds it in memory, and mirrors it to ~/.pilot/motd.json.
pilotctl reads only that local mirror — one file read, no network, no IPC — and re-validates the UTC day on read, so a stale mirror (for example, the daemon was offline across midnight) never shows yesterday's message.

central feed  ──poll──▶  pilot-daemon  ──mirror──▶  ~/.pilot/motd.json
 (Pilot team)             (only net I/O)              the local variable
                                                           │ read (no net, no IPC)
                                                           ▼
                              pilotctl <any command>  ──▶  prepends banner

No new binary ships — the poll is a goroutine inside pilot-daemon, modelled on the existing skill-reconciler loop.

Output: text vs JSON

Text mode prepends a Message of the day: <text> line and a blank line, then the normal command output.

--json mode does not prepend text (that would break parsing). Instead the standard envelope carries a top-level important_update field:

pilotctl --json info
# { "status": "ok", "data": { ... }, "important_update": "overlay maintenance 22:00 UTC" }

The same field is added to error envelopes. The daemon also surfaces the current value as motd inside pilotctl info.

Configuration

Operators running a daemon can tune or disable polling:

pilot-daemon --motd-feed-url <url>     # feed location; empty disables polling entirely
pilot-daemon --motd-interval 15m       # how often to re-fetch (default 15m)

The PILOT_MOTD_URL environment variable overrides the feed URL. The mirror lives next to the daemon identity (normally ~/.pilot/motd.json), which is where pilotctl looks.

Rules & semantics

UTC days. A message is active only on its UTC calendar day. pilotctl re-checks the day on read, so a message never lingers past its UTC day.
Self-clearing. When the active message is withdrawn, the banner disappears on its own within one poll interval — no action needed on your machine.
Fail-safe. Network errors and malformed responses are non-fatal: the daemon keeps its last good mirror and logs at debug level, so a transient fetch failure never blocks a command.

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