graphban-cli

gban — the client for a human at a terminal.

Five surfaces existed before this and none of them was for a person at a shell prompt: graphban talks to the database from inside the container, gbfleet supervises processes, gbagent is a spawned child, the web app is a browser, and /api/mcp is for agents. Issuing a seat, seeing why an agent is stuck, or re-tasking one meant opening a browser.

Specified by PRD-40.

Install

uv tool install graphban-cli

or, on macOS:

brew install asc-me/tap/gban

The formula carries no resource stanzas — graphban-cli has no runtime dependencies, so there is nothing to vendor and nothing to regenerate when a transitive moves. The supervisor is deliberately not in the tap; see below.

Add the supervisor too if you run waves — a separate package, and gban fleet hands off to it. At a terminal, gban fleet will offer to run this for you when it finds no supervisor; it asks first and never installs on a bare return, because a person who typed a read-only command did not consent to software being installed:

uv tool install graphban-fleet

That also gives you gbagent, the first-party coding agent: it is an entry point of graphban-fleet, not a package of its own, because the supervisor resolves it on PATH like any other vendor binary.

uv tool update-shell once, if uv says the bin directory is not on your PATH. uv tool upgrade --all to move both forward.

Two commands rather than one, and an extra (graphban-cli[fleet]) is deliberately not offered: uv tool install exposes only the REQUESTED package's executables, so an extra installs gbfleet into gban's environment and puts it on no path at all. Measured — with the extra, gban fleet reported "gbfleet is not installed here" while gbfleet sat in the very environment it was running from.

gban pulls nothing: client.py is urllib.request throughout, and the install lands exactly one distribution. gbfleet brings httpx and its transitives, which is why they are separate packages and not one.

With pip instead, into an environment you already have:

pip install graphban-cli

gban looks for gbfleet beside its own interpreter before falling back to PATH, so that shape works with neither on PATH.

To run an unreleased change, install from the repository instead — the same spec the release builds from:

uv tool install "git+https://github.com/asc-me/graphban.git#subdirectory=cli"

Releasing is docs/releasing.md.

gban login --server https://cloud.agentldgr.dev
gban doctor                       # both halves: the ledger, and the local fleet
gban agents                       # the roster, and why an agent is stuck
gban agents role SA-A4 planner    # what used to need a browser
gban seats issue worker worker planner                  # one entry per agent
gban keys                                               # which key is that agent on
gban fleet up --seats-file seats.txt --adapter claude   # hands off to gbfleet

seats issue takes one role per agent, repeats included, because that is the server's own shape: two agents on one seat share a session and cannot review each other. Each code is printed once and written nowhere — a CLI that helpfully saved them would invent a second credential at rest that no route and no test knows about.

agents prints what an agent was last refused, and why. That line is the reason the verb exists: a roster saying "idle worker" for an agent being told no on every call it makes is what made the Super-Arc diagnosis take a database query.

agents role re-tasks a live agent within its credential's ceiling and never past it. A role the key does not permit is the server's refusal, printed in the server's own words; widening a ceiling means minting a different credential, and keeping those two acts apart is the point of having a ceiling. It lands on the agent's next poll.

gban login wants a real terminal

It refuses without one, rather than prompting. getpass falls back to a plain echoing read when it cannot turn echo off — it warns, but the warning arrives after the person has decided to type — so a login through a pipe, a heredoc or an editor's command runner would put the password in the scrollback. There is no non-interactive login yet (PRD-40 open question 2: an API key cannot reach the JWT routes, so CI would need a service session).

Why not gb

Because gb is already git branch on a large share of developer machines, and an alias beats a binary on PATH. The deployed walk hit it on the very first command and got git's usage text; nothing inside the process can detect that, because by the time gb would have run, the alias did not.

It is not one alias but a whole namespace. oh-my-zsh's git plugin — which is where most of these come from — defines sixteen gb* aliases and ten grb*, so gb, gba, grb and gbl are all spoken for. gban is outside it, still short, and still says which product it belongs to.

Licence — Apache-2.0, deliberately not the repository's FSL-1.1

The repository is FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0. This directory is Apache-2.0, for the reasons PRD-22 §8 gives for fleet/ — every one of which applies here identically. gban is inert without a Graphban server and holds no authority of its own, so FSL's Competing Use clause protects the server and protects nothing here. It is a laptop-installed developer CLI, which is exactly the kind of dependency that has to clear a corporate licence policy scanner.

Why it is in this repository

Not a second repository, for the reason fleet/README.md gives for the supervisor, with more force: the client↔server contract has no schema anywhere, and a cross-repo break would present as absence reading clean — gban still runs, nothing errors, the verb quietly stops meaning what it said. The evidence is recent and specific: ROLES lost reviewer in one PR while another added a test naming it, and CI caught the pair inside seventeen minutes because both lived in one repository. Split across two, that lands as a bug report from somebody whose gban agents role ... reviewer started refusing.

Not inside backend/, because graphban-api pulls fastapi, sqlalchemy, pgvector, psycopg, alembic, redis and cryptography, and this installs on a laptop. tests/test_packaging.py derives its forbidden set from the backend's own dependency list rather than a denylist somebody maintains.

What it is not

It is not a second web app: no board, no PRD editor, no search. Every verb is either something a human currently opens a browser for, or a diagnosis nothing else gives.

It is not graphban, which talks to the local database from inside the container and stays exactly as it is. Mixing "against the DB in the container" and "over HTTP from a laptop" into one command is an ambiguity that ends with somebody purging the wrong instance.

It holds no state the server does not and computes nothing the server computes. Every verb is one endpoint, called once (PRD-40 D11); an ordering between two calls would be a rule, and a rule in the client is a second definition of something the server already enforces.