Herdr Rovo Dev Detector

A Herdr plugin that detects Rovo CLI and Rovo Dev CLI sessions and reports them as Herdr agents, so a running rovo (or legacy acli rovodev run) pane shows up in Herdr's sidebar agents list with a live status dot, just like Codex, Cursor Agent, and Claude Code.

Both CLIs are supported: the new Rovo CLI (rovo, state in ~/.rovo) and the legacy Rovo Dev CLI (acli rovodev run, state in ~/.rovodev).

Why

Herdr can track terminal AI-agent sessions and show their live state (working, blocked, idle) in a single dashboard, but it has no built-in Rovo integration, so Rovo panes are invisible to the agents list. This plugin closes that gap: it spots panes running the Rovo CLI or Rovo Dev CLI, infers what the session is doing, and reports it back to Herdr, entirely through Herdr's public plugin and CLI APIs.

What it does

This plugin uses Herdr's pane report-agent API to surface Rovo CLI and Rovo Dev CLI sessions.

It has two reporting paths, and hooks always take priority over scanning once they are active for a pane:

1. Rovo event hooks for lifecycle state changes such as prompt submitted, tool permission requested, tool started, run completed, and session ended. These carry structured, semantic event names straight from Rovo's own lifecycle, so they are immune to any future wording/UI changes in the CLI. Rovo's config only ever records the path to a small, stable launcher script (bin/rovo-herdr-hook-launcher, installed to ~/.rovo/hooks/herdr-managed/rovo-herdr-hook), never a path into the plugin's own install directory. The plugin's own directory is not a stable thing to reference: a fresh install briefly lives in an ephemeral temp checkout before Herdr relocates it, and it gets a new content hash on every upgrade after that. The launcher absorbs all of that churn by resolving the plugin's current location itself, at fire-time, through Herdr's public plugin list API, so the command recorded in Rovo's config never goes stale.
2. Pane scanning as a fallback that only applies to panes with no active hook pipeline yet - e.g. already-running panes from before hooks were installed, or sessions where hooks are not (yet) firing for some other reason. It never re-derives or overwrites the state of a pane that hooks are already reporting for, so the two paths cannot fight over the same pane's status.

On each scan it:

1. Lists panes and inspects the foreground process of each one.
2. Detects Rovo when the foreground command is rovo (new Rovo CLI) or acli rovodev run / atlassian_cli_rovodev run (legacy Rovo Dev CLI). Non-interactive serve sessions (e.g. the IDE-embedded atlassian_cli_rovodev serve) are ignored.
3. If the pane already has an active hook pipeline (it has received at least one hook event and has not since had a clean on_session_end), skips straight to step 5 without touching its state - hooks are trusted as-is.
4. Otherwise, reads recent pane output and classifies the session state.
5. Reports/keeps the pane as the rovo-dev agent with that state.
6. Resets any previously-detected pane to idle once Rovo is gone (e.g. it exited), and forgets its hook-active marker so a later, unrelated session reusing the same pane id has to re-earn hook trust from its own first event.

State classification

State is inferred from Rovo's visible output (best-effort heuristics):

State	Trigger examples
working	"Rovo is thinking" / "Rovo Dev is thinking", an active tool-call line, "Enter to queue, Ctrl+Enter to steer", "Esc to interrupt"
blocked	[y/n] prompts, "Do you want to...", "Waiting for input", approvals
idle	interactive prompt present (? for shortcuts, agent mode:) and quiet
unknown	nothing recognizable

Note: the footer ? for shortcuts. is shown by the Rovo CLI at all times, whether or not a run is in flight, so the working/blocked checks are evaluated first and take priority over the idle check.

The current Rovo agent mode: (e.g. plan) is reported as the agent's custom status.

Install

Herdr has no package registry. Plugins are distributed as Git repos and referenced either by local path or by owner/repo.

From GitHub (shareable)

herdr plugin install usrivastava92/herdr-rovo-dev              # latest default branch
herdr plugin install usrivastava92/herdr-rovo-dev --ref v1.0.0 # pin a tag/branch/commit
herdr plugin uninstall rovo-dev.detector

On install Herdr clones the repo, validates herdr-plugin.toml, and runs the [[build]] steps:

1. bin/check-deps - a preflight that verifies bash, jq, grep, and sed are on PATH. Herdr ships no bundled runtime and execs plugin commands directly on the host, so a missing tool fails the install with a clear message (and install hint) instead of failing mysteriously on the first scan.
2. chmod +x on the scripts, since Git does not always preserve the exec bit.
3. bin/install-rovo-hooks --auto - best-effort automatic hook install, so status updates are instant and event-driven out of the box without a separate manual step. This step is not allowed to fail the install: yq is an optional dependency (unlike bash/jq/grep/sed above) and the Rovo config may not exist yet if Rovo hasn't been run once on this machine, so if either prerequisite is missing it skips quietly instead of erroring. Run the install-hooks action manually any time afterwards (e.g. once yq is installed, or after running Rovo for the first time) to pick up hooks retroactively - see Usage.

The scanner also re-checks for jq at runtime as a second line of defense.

Local (development / private use)

herdr plugin link /path/to/herdr-rovo-dev
herdr plugin list --plugin rovo-dev.detector --json
herdr plugin unlink rovo-dev.detector

Usage

The plugin rescans automatically on pane.created, pane.focused, pane.moved, pane.exited, and tab.created. You can also trigger a scan manually:

herdr plugin action invoke scan --plugin rovo-dev.detector

Rovo event hooks are installed automatically at plugin-install time (see Install) whenever yq and an existing Rovo config are already present, so most users get instant, event-driven status updates with no extra step. Any running Rovo sessions from before install still need a restart to pick up the new hooks (Rovo reads its hook config once at startup), and sessions started afterwards get them automatically.

If the automatic install was skipped (missing yq, or Rovo hadn't been run yet), or you want to re-sync hooks after a config reset, (re)install them manually any time:

herdr plugin action invoke install-hooks --plugin rovo-dev.detector

This updates the Rovo config and creates a timestamped backup next to it. It preserves existing hook commands and only removes/replaces previous commands that contain rovo-herdr-hook, so it is safe to run repeatedly.

The config is resolved in this order:

1. ROVO_DEV_CONFIG_FILE - an explicit full path to a config.yml.
2. ROVO_USER_DIR / ROVODEV_USER_DIR - an explicit state dir; uses its config.yml.
3. ~/.rovo/config.yml (new Rovo CLI) if it exists.
4. ~/.rovodev/config.yml (legacy Rovo Dev CLI) if it exists.
5. ~/.rovo/config.yml as the default target when neither exists yet.

If you run both CLIs and want hooks in both, install once per config, e.g.:

ROVO_DEV_CONFIG_FILE=~/.rovo/config.yml    herdr plugin action invoke install-hooks --plugin rovo-dev.detector
ROVO_DEV_CONFIG_FILE=~/.rovodev/config.yml herdr plugin action invoke install-hooks --plugin rovo-dev.detector

To remove the bridge hooks:

herdr plugin action invoke uninstall-hooks --plugin rovo-dev.detector

This also removes the stable launcher copy that was placed next to the config (e.g. ~/.rovo/hooks/herdr-managed/rovo-herdr-hook), so uninstall leaves no residue.

Then confirm:

herdr agent list

Development loop

herdr plugin link .
herdr plugin action list --plugin rovo-dev.detector
herdr plugin action invoke scan --plugin rovo-dev.detector
herdr plugin log list --plugin rovo-dev.detector
herdr plugin unlink rovo-dev.detector

You can also run the scanner directly from a Herdr pane:

./bin/scan-rovo-panes

Requirements

• Herdr >= 0.7.0
• macOS or Linux (Windows via WSL/Git Bash - anything with a POSIX shell)
• bash, jq, grep, and sed on PATH

Limitations and future work

• Detection is event-driven for panes without active hooks. Their state only refreshes when one of the subscribed lifecycle events fires (or on a manual scan), so a session that transitions from working to blocked without any pane event may show a stale state until the next event. Once a pane has an active hook pipeline, this does not apply - hooks push state changes immediately and scanning stops touching that pane's state entirely.
• Rovo hook changes are loaded when the CLI reads its config. Restart existing Rovo CLI / Rovo Dev CLI sessions after installing hooks so they pick up the new commands. Until restarted, such a session has no active hook pipeline yet and is covered by the scan fallback above.
• State classification is heuristic and based on Rovo's current TUI output. This only affects the scan fallback for panes without active hooks - it is never used to override an already-hooked pane's state. If Rovo's interface text changes, the patterns in bin/herdr-lib.sh (classify_state) may need updating for that fallback path.
• No durable Rovo session id/path is reported yet; if Rovo exposes one, it can be passed via --agent-session-id / --agent-session-path.

Files

herdr-rovo-dev/
  herdr-plugin.toml   manifest: actions + event hooks
  bin/
    scan-rovo-panes   main scanner
    rovo-herdr-hook    Rovo event hook bridge
    rovo-herdr-hook-launcher  stable launcher copied into ~/.rovo/hooks/
    install-rovo-hooks installs bridge commands into Rovo config
    uninstall-rovo-hooks removes bridge commands from Rovo config
    herdr-lib.sh      shared helpers (detection, classification, reporting)
    check-deps        install-time dependency preflight
  LICENSE
  CONTRIBUTING.md
  README.md

References

• Herdr plugins: https://herdr.dev/docs/plugins/
• Herdr CLI reference: https://herdr.dev/docs/cli-reference/
• Herdr socket API: https://herdr.dev/docs/socket-api/
• Rovo CLI / Rovo Dev CLI: https://www.atlassian.com/software/rovo

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev loop, testing steps, and commit conventions (this project uses Conventional Commits).

License

MIT © Utkarsh Srivastava

This is an independent, community-built plugin. "Rovo Dev" and "Herdr" are trademarks of their respective owners; this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.