Retire an instrument

Retire an instrument when it is decommissioned or out of service for a long stretch. Retirement sets status to inactive (shown as Retired), removes it from the sidebar and dashboard lists of live instruments, and stops new uploads. Nothing is deleted from storage; you can reactivate later.

What retirement does

When you retire an instrument:

• Status becomes inactive (UI: Retired), with retiredAt / retiredBy audit fields
• It stops accepting new runs and watchers
• All existing runs and files stay browsable
• Every active watcher on that instrument is deregistered in the same request so they stop heartbeating

Instrument IDs stay permanent. Retire rather than trying to rename or delete an instrument that has already produced data.

Retire from the web app

The instrument moves to the Retired tab on Instruments.

Reactivate

From a retired instrument’s detail page, choose Reactivate. Status returns to active and the instrument reappears in the sidebar and dashboard.

Watchers deregistered at retirement do not reconnect automatically. An operator must re-register (usually data-hub-watcher init on the instrument PC) after reactivation.

Via the API

# Retire
curl -X PATCH https://datahub.example.com/api/v1/instruments/bio-rad-cfx96 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer dhub_your_token_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"status":"inactive"}'

# Reactivate
curl -X PATCH https://datahub.example.com/api/v1/instruments/bio-rad-cfx96 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer dhub_your_token_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"status":"active"}'

Session callers need the admin role; bearer tokens need instruments:write.