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The message of the day (MOTD) is a network-wide banner the Pilot Protocol team can surface for a single UTC calendar day. When a message is active, it is prepended to the output of every pilotctl command. Use cases: maintenance windows, incident updates, breaking-change heads-ups. Messages are managed centrally by the Pilot Protocol team; there is nothing to set up to receive them. When no message is active for the current UTC day, output is unchanged.
pilotctl info
Message of the day: overlay maintenance 22:00 UTC — expect ~5min blips
<normal pilotctl info output>The daemon is the only component that touches the network. A background loop fetches the central feed every interval (default 15m), selects the entry dated for the current UTC day, holds it in memory, and mirrors it to ~/.pilot/motd.json. pilotctl reads only that local mirror — one file read, no network, no IPC — and re-validates the UTC day on read, so a stale mirror never shows yesterday's message. No new binary ships; the poll is a goroutine inside pilot-daemon.
Text mode prepends a "Message of the day: <text>" line, then the normal output. In --json mode the standard envelope carries a top-level important_update field instead (prepending text would break parsing). The same field is added to error envelopes, and the daemon surfaces the current value as motd inside pilotctl info.
pilotctl --json info
# { "status": "ok", "data": { ... }, "important_update": "overlay maintenance 22:00 UTC" }Operators running a daemon can tune or disable polling:
pilot-daemon --motd-feed-url <url> # feed location; empty disables polling entirely
pilot-daemon --motd-interval 15m # how often to re-fetch (default 15m)The PILOT_MOTD_URL environment variable overrides the feed URL. The mirror lives next to the daemon identity (normally ~/.pilot/motd.json), which is where pilotctl looks.