OuEstCharlie — Wally

Wally is the search/consumption agent for OuEstCharlie. It is stateless and read-only: Woof launches it as a child process (MCP server over stdio), passes a structured search predicate via search_photos, and Wally returns matching photo metadata by traversing the manifest tree. It never reads XMP sidecars or writes anything.

More about OuEstCharlie on the OuEstCharlie Blog

Design Documents

Repository Structure

See wally_LLD.md

Installation

From PyPI (recommended)

pip install wally

System prerequisites:

• macOS: brew install inih brotli gettext (required by pyexiv2 at runtime)
• Linux/Windows: no extra steps

From source (development)

Requires the sibling ouestcharlie-py-toolkit repo:

uv venv
uv sync

Running Tests

.venv/bin/pytest tests/ -v

MCP Inspector

Wally runs as a standalone HTTP server (streamable HTTP transport), so it cannot use mcp dev. Start it manually and connect the Inspector to the printed port:

WOOF_BACKEND_CONFIG='{"type":"filesystem","root":"/path/to/photos","name":"my-backend"}' \
    .venv/bin/python -m wally
# stdout: WALLY_READY port=<port>

Then start the Inspector and connect to http://127.0.0.1:<port>/mcp (no auth token needed when WOOF_AGENT_TOKEN is unset):

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector

Note: The default MCP Inspector timeout is too low for large-library search queries. Increase it in the Inspector settings before calling search_photos.

Context

See ouestcharlie/HLD.md for the overall system architecture.