Relative entries in skills.external_dirs were resolved against the
process cwd via Path.resolve(), making them silently fail when Hermes
was launched from a different directory.
Resolve relative paths against get_hermes_home() for consistent
behavior across CLI, gateway, and cron contexts. Absolute paths
and env-var/tilde expansion are unchanged.
When the LLM returns an empty completion, gateway/run.py replaced
final_response with the literal string '(No response generated)'.
This defeated cron/scheduler.py's empty-response skip guard, causing
the placeholder to be delivered to home channels.
Changes:
- gateway/run.py: return empty string instead of placeholder when
there is no error and no response content
- cron/scheduler.py: defensively strip the placeholder text in case
any upstream path still produces it
FixesNousResearch/hermes-agent#9270
The setup wizard accepted any string as a Telegram bot token without
validation. Invalid tokens were only caught at runtime when the gateway
failed to connect, with no clear error message.
Add regex validation for the expected format (<numeric_id>:<hash>) and
loop until a valid token is entered or the user cancels.
When .env files become corrupted (e.g. concatenated KEY=VALUE pairs on
a single line due to concurrent writes or encoding issues), both
python-dotenv and load_env() would parse the entire concatenated string
as a single value. This caused bot tokens to appear duplicated up to 8×,
triggering InvalidToken errors from the Telegram API.
Root cause: _sanitize_env_lines() — which correctly splits concatenated
lines — was only called during save_env_value() writes, not during reads.
Fix:
- load_env() now calls _sanitize_env_lines() before parsing
- env_loader.load_hermes_dotenv() sanitizes the .env file on disk
before python-dotenv reads it, so os.getenv() also returns clean values
- Added tests reproducing the exact corruption pattern from #8908Closes#8908