frontmattering 0.4.4

Governed frontmatter, freshness tethers, and validate-only runtime gates for agent-facing Markdown

Frontmattering

Frontmattering makes Markdown safer for agents.

It adds governed frontmatter, task routing, body/frontmatter freshness tethers, and a vendorable validate-only runtime gate so an agent can consume a compact brief without silently relying on stale documentation.

Install

python -m pip install frontmattering
frontmattering --version
frontmattering doctor

First-hour path

Initialize governance at your repository root; your Markdown lives under docs/ (the default corpus is docs/**/*.md). promote takes one file per call, and exactly one document is the router.

frontmattering init . --set-id MYDOCS --title "My docs"
frontmattering promote docs/INDEX.md --profile router --in-place
frontmattering promote docs/GUIDE.md --profile guide --in-place
frontmattering tether update --add .
frontmattering validate .
frontmattering brief .

Promote each additional document with its own frontmattering promote <file> --profile guide --in-place call. Promoting a file that is not inside the selected corpus fails before the file is touched (FRONTMATTERING-AUTHORING-TARGET-OUTSIDE-CORPUS).

For strict freshness enforcement, set validation_profile: trust in .frontmattering/project.yaml, then run:

frontmattering validate .
frontmattering brief .

Runtime gate

frontmattering runtime pack --out frontmattering-runtime.pyz
python frontmattering-runtime.pyz validate docs --format json

The runtime artifact is validate-only. It does not expose init, promote, new, index, tether update, or authoring surfaces.

License

Frontmattering is source-available. It is free for individual personal use within the scope of LICENSE.md. Professional, organizational, employer, client, CI/CD, hosted, managed-service, platform, consulting, or revenue-connected use is permitted for a 30-day evaluation period under LICENSE.md; continued use after the evaluation requires a paid commercial license.

Frontmattering is not open-source software under the Open Source Definition because professional and organizational use is restricted without a commercial license.

Runtime dependency status is recorded in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md; project notices are recorded in NOTICE.

Claim boundary

A FRESH brief means the current body bytes and canonical trust-bearing frontmatter fields match their mechanical tether. It does not prove semantic summary correctness, human approval, external adoption, or production suitability.

A STALE or UNTETHERED summary must not be relied on without reading the body.

Publication status

This v0.4.4 package hardens the first-hour path: the quickstart initializes at the repository root, promote --in-place is transactional (it fails before mutation when a target is outside the selected corpus, FRONTMATTERING-AUTHORING-TARGET-OUTSIDE-CORPUS), and the validate-only runtime corrects its --help and no-path behavior. No frontmatter-schema or canonical-model (v0.1.5) changes. Custom license text should still receive legal review before paid commercial sales.