agentstow

One canonical .agents/ folder, fanned out to all your AI coding agents.

Website and docs: https://agentstow.dev/

The Commons — the canonical ~/.agents/ directory — holds the single real copy of every config you share: skills, instructions, MCP servers, slash commands, agents and hooks. agentstow sync fans it out to every agent you actually have installed.

Configs that can be byte-identical everywhere are symlinked, so there is one file seen from ten places and drift is impossible by construction. Configs that cannot be — MCP servers and hooks, which live inside files the agent also owns, in formats no two agents share — are rendered and key-merged, with your other keys preserved.

There is no state file. There never will be. The filesystem is the state.

~/.agents/
├── skills/<name>/       fanned out as symlinks
├── commands/<name>.md
├── agents/<name>.md
├── AGENTS.md            symlink, import-line, or rules-dir link per agent
├── mcp.json             rendered into each agent's native dialect
└── hooks/<Event>.toml   merged by command string

Install

npm install -g agentstow      # prebuilt binary, macOS, Linux and Windows, no toolchain
pip install agentstow         # the same binary, shipped as a wheel
cargo install agentstow       # from source, needs Rust 1.97+

npx agentstow doctor          # or try it first, without installing anything
uvx agentstow doctor          # the same, if you reach for uv rather than npm

On macOS and Linux there is also a Homebrew tap. It lives in this repository rather than a separate homebrew-agentstow one, so it is tapped by URL:

brew tap agentstow/tap https://github.com/agentstow/agentstow
brew trust agentstow/tap      # Homebrew 6 refuses to load untrusted third-party taps
brew install agentstow

Use

agentstow init            # create the Commons and report what this machine already has
agentstow adopt <path>    # take a path under management; --dry-run names the mechanic
agentstow sync            # fan out; --dry-run prints the full plan
agentstow status          # what is linked, what is not, and what is not ours
agentstow doctor          # installed agents, Commons hygiene, Sourced entries
agentstow revert <agent>  # offboard one agent (refuses until you disable it)
agentstow mcp list | adopt | remove | enable | disable

adopt picks its mechanic from where the path lives: a real config inside an agent's directory is moved into the Commons with a link left behind; a path inside a git repo becomes a Sourced entry — the Commons links out to it and the repo keeps the truth; anything else is copied in. To gate CI on drift use status (exit 0 clean, 2 actionable, 1 error) — sync --dry-run previews, it does not gate.

Agents

Claude Code, Codex, opencode, pi, oh-my-pi, OpenClaw, Hermes, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Windsurf, Roo and Cline. Detection is simply whether the agent's config directory exists — agentstow never creates one. Agents that read ~/.agents/skills natively (Codex, opencode, oh-my-pi, Gemini CLI, Cursor) get no skill links written, because nothing needs to be — and where an agent still reads its old fan-out directory beside the Commons (Codex, Cursor), sync prunes agentstow's now-duplicate links from it.

Interop

The Commons speaks the conventions that won: skills/<name>/SKILL.md — the layout opencode and friends read natively — one AGENTS.md, and an mcp.json in the standard mcpServers shape. .agents Protocol surfaces (tasks/, memories/, models.json, system-prompt.md) are recognized by doctor and never touched.

What it will not touch

Anything it does not own. A symlink pointing outside the Commons, a hand-written file, an MCP server whose name isn't in the Commons — all Foreign, all reported by status, none ever modified. A real directory shadowing a Commons entry is a Variant: deliberate, preserved, and counted as actionable only when its contents are identical to the Commons copy, so you can dedupe on purpose.

The Commons is exactly that — a commons, not agentstow's alone. opencode, oh-my-pi and Hermes read ~/.agents/ themselves, and other tools keep their own files there. doctor names entries that aren't agentstow's and leaves them be; status stays target-only, since a neighbour's file has no fan-out to report.

Configuration

Optional agentstow.toml in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/agentstow/ (default ~/.config/agentstow/): disable targets, define custom ones, scope MCP servers per agent, per-agent Tweaks. The lock — agentstow's only machine state — lives in $XDG_STATE_HOME/agentstow/ (default ~/.local/state/agentstow/). Environment: AGENTSTOW_HOME relocates the Commons (doctor warns — native readers won't follow), AGENTSTOW_TARGET_ROOT resolves everything against another root, AGENTSTOW_LOCK_TIMEOUT_MS bounds the lock wait.

What it does not do

No cross-machine sync — version the Commons with git or chezmoi. No undo — refusals come before writes, sync plans everything before writing anything, sync and adopt preview with --dry-run, re-runs are idempotent, and a git-versioned Commons is better history than any journal. No memory sync: agent memory is not a defined artifact and agentstow will not pretend otherwise. No GUI, daemon or file watcher. It does not install skills; it fans out whatever is in the Commons, whoever put it there.

On Windows, creating symlinks requires Developer Mode (Settings → System → For developers) or an elevated shell; sync says exactly that when it cannot link.

Name and inspiration

The name is a nod to GNU Stow, the classic symlink-farm manager — agentstow does for agent configs what Stow does for dotfiles. The project is also inspired by two neighbours in the same space: dotagents and agentsync.

Documentation · agentstow.dev · MIT