ouestcharlie-wally 0.5.0

OuEstCharlie Wally — photo search/consumption agent

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

Document	Purpose
wally_LLD.md	Low-level design

Repository Structure

src/wally/
├── __main__.py   # Entry point (stdio MCP server)
├── agent.py      # WallyAgent(AgentBase) — MCP tool registration, date parsing
└── searcher.py   # Pure async search logic — no MCP dependency, independently testable

tests/
└── test_searcher.py

searcher.py has no MCP dependency and can be unit-tested directly. agent.py is the thin adapter that registers the tool with FastMCP and handles date string parsing and result serialization.

Installation

From PyPI (recommended)

pip install wally

From source (development)

Requires the sibling ouestcharlie-py-toolkit repo:

uv venv
uv sync

Running Tests

Always use .venv/bin/python -m pytest:

.venv/bin/python -m 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

Repository	Purpose
ouestcharlie	Architecture docs, HLR/HLD, MCP interface
ouestcharlie-py-toolkit	Python toolkit for agents
ouestcharlie-whitebeard	Indexing agent
ouestcharlie-wally (this repo)	Search/consumption agent
ouestcharlie-woof	Woof controller

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