auditreach-cli (Python)

Official-API-only, BYOK CLI and library for researching Reddit and YouTube with your own API keys and a tamper-evident, hash-chained audit log -- built for AI agents and compliance teams that can't rely on cookie-based scraping or shared credential pools.

Why this exists

auditreach talks to Reddit and YouTube only through their official, documented APIs, using your own API keys -- never a shared pool -- and every single query writes a hash-chained entry to a local audit log: which platform, which endpoint, which scope, and a plain-language line explaining the consent/ToS basis for that specific call. No cookie import, no session-token reuse, no code path that could pretend to be a logged-in human. See the project README for the full compliance rationale. This package is the Python distribution -- a genuine, independent port of the npm CLI's logic, not a wrapper around the Node binary.

Install

pip install auditreach-cli

or with uv:

uv add auditreach-cli

The complementary JS/TS distribution installs the same way on the npm side: npm install -g auditreach-cli (or npx auditreach-cli search ... to run it once without installing) -- see the project README for that package. Both are first-class, maintained together; neither is deprecated in favor of the other.

Quickstart

1. Set up credentials for the platform you want to search (BYO-key -- your own, never shared):

auditreach auth --platform reddit
# Prompts for Client ID, Client secret, username, password.
# Create a script-app at https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps first.

auditreach auth --platform youtube
# Prompts for an API key.
# Create one at https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials

By default, credentials are stored in your OS keychain via the keyring package (Keychain on macOS, Credential Manager on Windows, Secret Service/kwallet on Linux) -- the Python-ecosystem equivalent of the npm package's @napi-rs/keyring dependency. This port additionally checks a platform-specific environment variable first (AUDITREACH_REDDIT_CLIENT_ID, AUDITREACH_REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET, AUDITREACH_REDDIT_USERNAME, AUDITREACH_REDDIT_PASSWORD, AUDITREACH_YOUTUBE_API_KEY), falling back to the keychain when unset -- a deliberate addition beyond the npm package's keychain-only design, since a headless CI runner or an agent sandbox often has no interactive prompt and no keychain daemon running at all. Nothing is ever hardcoded either way; see docs/concepts.md for the full precedence rule.

2. Search:

auditreach search --platform reddit --query "your query" --subreddit some_subreddit
auditreach search --platform youtube --query "your query" --channel @SomeChannel

Real output:

AuditReach -- Official-API Research CLI
Platform: Reddit  |  Auth: OAuth script-app grant, read-only, public-subreddit scope

Fetching... (official API, rate-limit aware)
✓ 14 results returned (Reddit API Terms -- public content, official API, read-only script-app credentials)

RESULTS (14)
[1] "How are people testing for memory poisoning in long-running agents?"
    u/some_researcher · 2026-07-05T14:22:00.000Z
    https://reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/...
...

Audit log entry written: ar_2026-07-16_9f3c2a
Consent basis: Reddit API Terms -- public content, official API, read-only script-app credentials
Full results: ./auditreach-results-2026-07-16.json
Full audit trail: ./auditreach.log.jsonl

3. Verify the audit log has not been tampered with:

auditreach verify-log

Verifying ./auditreach.log.jsonl...
✓ Chain intact: 14 entries, no gaps, no tampering detected.

Using the library instead of the CLI

from auditreach import RedditClient, get_reddit_credentials, RedditSearchOptions

credentials = get_reddit_credentials()
if credentials is None:
    raise SystemExit("run `auditreach auth --platform reddit` first")

outcome = RedditClient(credentials).search(
    RedditSearchOptions(query="agent memory poisoning", subreddit="MachineLearning")
)
for item in outcome.items:
    print(item.title, item.url)

from auditreach import verify_audit_log_chain

result = verify_audit_log_chain()
if not result.valid:
    print(f"Chain broken at entry {result.broken_at_index}: {result.reason}")

The Python library API uses idiomatic snake_case attribute names (created_at, client_secret, broken_at_index, ...); the on-the-wire JSON this CLI writes (the audit log file, --output results files, and --json stdout output) uses the same field names the npm package's JSON output uses, so a script or agent parsing either CLI's output sees identical keys.

Commands

auditreach has four subcommands, matching the npm CLI's flags exactly.

auditreach search

auditreach auth

auditreach verify-log

auditreach mcp

Runs an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server over stdio, exposing 3 tools that reuse the exact same command logic as the CLI above -- no reimplementation, no drift:

auth_status is deliberately read-only: it can check whether credentials are already stored and valid, but it can never set or clear them. Setting up or clearing BYOK credentials stays a local-CLI-only, human-driven action via auditreach auth -- never exposed over MCP.

Point any MCP-compatible client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, etc.) at:

auditreach mcp

or, without a global install:

pipx run auditreach-cli mcp

See .well-known/agent.json at the repo root for the machine-readable discovery manifest (tool schemas, transport, invocation commands).

Run auditreach <command> --help any time to see the exact flags your installed version supports.

How the hash chain works

Every entry in auditreach.log.jsonl is hash-chained -- each entry's hash is computed from a canonical (recursively key-sorted) JSON serialization of its own content, and the next entry references the previous entry's hash via prev_entry_hash. verify-log re-derives every entry's hash from its stored content and checks it against the stored entry_hash, then checks every prev_entry_hash link against the actual previous entry. Either check failing (a hand-edited field, a deleted entry, a reordered entry) breaks the chain at an identifiable index. This is a faithful port of the same algorithm (SHA-256 over canonical JSON, the same chain-link field) the npm package's src/audit-log/ modules implement -- see docs/concepts.md for the full data model, and tests/test_hash_chain.py in this package for the tamper-detection tests (a mutated entry, a broken chain link, and a deleted middle entry are each caught and pinpointed).

Platform coverage

Same as the npm package: Reddit (OAuth2 password grant, direct REST calls via the stdlib urllib instead of a third-party HTTP library) and YouTube (YouTube Data API v3, called directly over REST instead of pulling in Google's full google-api-python-client SDK and its own dependency chain) are shipped. X (Twitter) is not yet shipped in either distribution -- see the project README for why. auditreach-cli's runtime dependencies are keyring and the official mcp Python SDK (used only by the auditreach mcp subcommand).

Security

See SECURITY.md for the vulnerability disclosure policy. Credentials are never logged, printed, or written to the audit log -- only a 6-character scrypt-derived fingerprint of the credential used for a given query appears there. No eval/exec of anything read from user input or an API response, no shell/subprocess calls, and no third-party HTTP library in the request path (stdlib urllib only).

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide, covering both the TypeScript and Python codebases.

cd python
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

License

Apache 2.0, see LICENSE.