When beads can’t find or create a dolt database, delete the local dolt state and reinit.

The errors look like this:

Error: failed to open Dolt store: database "bs" not available after CREATE DATABASE: Error 1049 (HY000): database not found: bs

or:

Error: failed to open database: database "bs" not found on Dolt server at 127.0.0.1:3308

Fix it by stopping dolt and removing its local state:

bd dolt stop  # or you won't be able to delete all the files
rm -rf .beads/dolt/
rm .beads/dolt-server.*

Also check .beads/metadata.json for stale server connection config. Mine had extra fields that were messing things up. I cleaned it down to just the essentials:

{
  "database": "dolt",
  "backend": "dolt",
  "dolt_mode": "server",
  "dolt_database": "bs",
  "project_id": "deadbeef-9164-426d-8c1c-ff8ae5d35e3e"
}

Then reinit: bd init --force --prefix <yourprefix>.

bd doctor --fix couldn’t sort this out, which is why I ended up doing all this manual cleanup.

I hit this upgrading to beads 0.61.0 when switching to shared-server mode.