Daemon mode¶

DaVinci Resolve's cold scripting connection takes 2-3 seconds on macOS. For LLM agents and shell scripts that run many sequential commands, that handshake dominates wall-clock time.

dvr serve runs once in the background and serves requests over a Unix-domain socket.

Quick start¶

dvr serve start                  # detaches into the background
dvr timeline list                # ~50ms instead of ~2.5s
dvr timeline inspect             # ~50ms
dvr serve stop

Transparent CLI forwarding¶

While the daemon is running, every ordinary dvr command automatically routes through it — no flags needed. The client forwards its arguments over the socket, the daemon executes the command in-process against its persistent Resolve connection, and stdout/stderr/exit code come back unchanged. You keep the exact same CLI; you just stop paying the cold connect.

What always runs locally instead:

dvr serve ..., dvr mcp ..., dvr completion, dvr plugin, dvr repl, dvr doctor
streaming / long-blocking commands (render watch, anything with --stream or --wait)
anything when DVR_NO_DAEMON=1 is set

Set DVR_DAEMON=auto to have the first dvr command spawn the daemon automatically when the socket doesn't exist yet.

Status¶

dvr serve status

{
  "running": true,
  "pid": 91234,
  "socket": "/Users/you/.cache/dvr/dvr.sock"
}

Wire format¶

The daemon speaks newline-delimited JSON over its Unix socket. One request per line, one response per line:

{"id": "abc", "method": "timeline.inspect", "params": {}}

{"id": "abc", "ok": true, "result": {"name": "MyShow", "fps": 24, ...}}

Errors come back as the standard DvrError.to_dict() payload:

{"id": "abc", "ok": false, "error": {"type": "TimelineError", "message": "...", "cause": "...", "fix": "...", "state": {}}}

Method allow-list¶

The daemon dispatches against an explicit allow-list to prevent arbitrary attribute traversal. List it with:

dvr serve methods

Examples: timeline.inspect, project.list, project.ensure, render.submit, render.queue, app.page.set, app.version.

Python client¶

from dvr.daemon import Client

client = Client()
result = client.call("timeline.inspect")

If the daemon isn't running, the client raises dvr.errors.ConnectionError with a fix pointing to dvr serve start.

Socket location¶

Platform	Default socket path
macOS / Linux (no `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR`)	`~/.cache/dvr/dvr.sock`
Linux (with `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR`)	`$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/dvr/dvr.sock`
Windows	not currently supported — use the in-process Python library

The socket is created with mode 0600 — same-user only.

Lifecycle¶

The daemon holds exactly one Resolve connection. If Resolve quits, the daemon's connection becomes stale; restart the daemon (dvr serve stop && dvr serve start).

For automation, you can detach the daemon from a single shell command:

dvr serve start --background       # default
dvr serve start --foreground       # blocking, useful for systemd-style supervision