Title: Windows: backend startup step never hands off to npm run dev (app appears stuck after Ollama pull)

Hey guys,

this paste below is from Claude. I had to use it to get this working within Pinokio. Hope it helps so others can get it working more easily. Thanks!

Environment

Pinokio 8.0.40
Windows 11 Home, build 26200
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3090

Symptom

After ollama pull llama3 completes successfully, Pinokio's terminal shows only:

2026-09-06T17:00:43.455957Z WARN local_backend: Running without a proxy in release mode -- UDF `fetch` requests are unrestricted!

...and then nothing further happens, indefinitely. No browser opens, no npm run dev output ever appears, and no node.exe process shows up in Task Manager. Running convex-local-backend.exe manually (outside Pinokio) works fine and immediately proceeds to Listening on http://0.0.0.0:3210 and 3211.

Likely cause

In start.js, the backend step sets RUST_LOG=warn, which suppresses the INFO-level lines (including the "Listening on..." lines) that the app previously used to confirm startup. The step's own completion trigger is a generic /.+/ regex (any non-empty output), which should fire on the very first WARN line — but on Windows, the hand-off to the next step (npm run dev) never actually happens. This looks like a bug/race specific to how Pinokio detects step completion on Windows for this script, not an issue with Ollama, the firewall, or the user's network.

Workaround

With the backend window still open/running, manually run the frontend step yourself:

cd C:\pinokio\api\aitown.git\app
C:\pinokio\bin\miniconda\condabin\conda_hook.bat & conda activate base && npm run dev

(Adjust the miniconda path if your install uses miniforge instead — check with where /r C:\pinokio conda_hook.bat.)

Once npm run dev is running, open http://localhost:5173/ai-town in a browser directly (Pinokio's own regex-based auto-open, looking for a URL containing "ai-town", also doesn't seem to fire reliably). The frontend loads normally and connects to Ollama without issue once this manual step is done.

Suggested fix

Either remove/adjust the RUST_LOG=warn override so a more specific "ready" string is still emitted, or fix the step's on completion detection so it reliably advances to the npm run dev step on Windows.