Starting over

Resets the machine and walks you back through setup. Not a document is deleted.

Resets this machine and walks you back through setup. It does not delete your data.

This is not uninstalling

Removing Loghound from the machine entirely is a different tool, which asks before it deletes anything and proves your account owns an index before it removes it. The reinstall button never deletes an index.

01 · Exactly what goes, and what stays
WhatWhat happens to it
Your Opensolr indexes, and everything in themUntouched. Not a document is deleted, and both indexes stay on your account exactly as they are. Setup will offer them back to you as a pair you can rejoin, so a reinstall can land on the same history it started with.
Your access log filesUntouched. Loghound never writes to them, and a reinstall does not change that.
The sign-inRemoved. The username, the password and two-factor all go, and every browser that was staying signed in is signed out — including the one you are using. You will set a new username and password at the end of setup.
The chosen log filesForgotten. Setup scans for them again and asks you to confirm the format, the same as on a first install.
The index names and connection detailsForgotten by this machine. Nothing is deleted at Opensolr; the panel simply stops pointing at them until setup names a pair again.
The local state databaseDeleted. That is the tailer’s read position in every log file, the sessions still open, the beacon rows not yet merged, and the enrichment caches. Afterwards each log is read from its end again, so the gap is not backfilled and sessions in flight are lost. Everything already indexed is unaffected.
The Opensolr account detailsKept. The email, the API key and the region stay, so setup can show you the indexes that account already holds instead of asking for the key again. Change the account in the Solr card if that is what you want.
The beacon signing key and the address saltKept, deliberately. A new signing key would make every token already in a visitor’s browser invalid, and the scorer reads an invalid token as evidence of a bot — so rotating it would turn honest traffic into false verdicts. A new address salt would stop hashed visitors matching themselves across the reinstall.
The service and the timersLeft running and still enabled at boot. The reader keeps the configuration it started with — a reload onto a half-finished one is refused and logged — so it carries on writing to the indexes it already had and nothing is corrupted.
02 · How to do it

In the panel, the Reinstall card at the bottom of Settings. It requires you to type the word REINSTALL, and a current authenticator code if two-factor is on.

You stay signed in to this browser for setup itself

Pressing the button proves who you are, and that proof is carried into the installer, so you are not sent back to the server for the token file. It lasts half an hour, it is used once, and it belongs to this browser alone — anyone else reaching the installer still has to read the file over a shell.

Or from a shell, which does exactly the same thing:

sudo -u loghound php /opt/loghound/bin/loghound-setup --reset

Unattended, the confirmation is a variable that defaults to no, so an automated run cannot wipe a working installation by tripping over the flag:

sudo -u loghound LOGHOUND_CONFIRM_RESET=yes \
     php /opt/loghound/bin/loghound-setup --reset --non-interactive
03 · Stopping ingestion while you do it — optional

The reader keeps the configuration it started with and a reload onto a half-finished one is refused, so leaving it running is safe: it simply carries on writing to the indexes it already had. If you want a clean break anyway:

sudo systemctl stop loghound-tail.service

And afterwards:

sudo systemctl start loghound-tail.service
loghound-tail --status --human

Loghound is open source and MIT licensed. Questions about the Opensolr half — the account, the indexes, the plan — go to opensolr.com/contact; questions about the software itself belong on GitHub.

Loghound Documentation