Outrage

A simple RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system for LLMs, designed to just work with minimal setup, and provide a memory that interoperates between coding harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot CLI.

Features

• Simple to get started with - built in initialisation configures everything.
• Hierarchical key based store of data and arbitrary metadata.
• LLM search - LLM subagents add summary and keyword metadata to documents, and LLM subagents can search documents and metadata.
• Multiple data stores including parquet based stores for large-scale reference material, and an experimental PostgreSQL store shared by several devices.
• Explicit support for command-line coding agents: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, Cursor Agent, and GitHub Copilot CLI.
• Command line tools for manipulating the data stores.

Getting started

Set up a 3.12 or later Python environment.

Install outrage with:

pip install "outrage[all]"

That includes every optional backend and document reader. A plain pip install outrage leaves them out, for an install that only ever holds session context.

To set up a project to use Outrage, change directory to the root of the project and run:

outrage init

And that's it. That will set up the MCP server, tools, skills, agents and hooks such that when you run your LLM harness the agent will use the Outrage store as a memory.

The server also mounts a writable user-wide store at home, kept in an .outrage directory in your home directory.

One minor issue when using Copilot CLI: the working directory must be inside a Git repository. Otherwise, Copilot CLI will fail to load the MCP servers and other configuration.

Documentation

All of it is in src/outrage/documents, a documentation tree written to be read through the store: it ships in the wheel, and the server mounts it read-only at the outrage key by default, so a session reads the manual with the same tools it reads everything else with. (--mount-docs is the flag; it exists for the command line, which does not mount it unasked.) It is ordinary markdown as well, so the links below work here too.

• the documents - the top of that tree, and where to start. Keys, the command line, the tools and the conventions all hang off it.
• the design - components, the key namespace and its grammar, what text is and how it is encoded, tool semantics and the SQLite schema. Decisions that are deferred or still open are recorded at the end. Read as outrage/design through the store.
• the implementation - what is built so far and the planned build order, stage by stage. outrage/implementation.
• the API reference - a page per module, generated from the docstrings and committed. Do not edit a page there by hand: it is build output, and tests/test_reference.py fails when it stops matching the source.
• importers - turning an outside source into a store, starting with Wikimedia dumps. outrage/importers.
• development - the development environment, and configuring the stores and mounts a checkout runs against. outrage/development.

Components

• MCP server - Python, stdio, for local use. Exposes the store as tools.
• Data store - a Python library, independent of MCP so that it can be tested and reused on its own. One interface with five backends behind it, each named for how it reads, and which one a store file uses follows from its extension. SQLite is the read-write default: a store accumulated a document at a time, which is what session context and notes on a codebase are. Parquet files are written whole by outrage pack and read many times, for a reference base of tens of thousands of documents or more - 11× smaller than the same corpus in SQLite. DuckDB reads them, one file or many, and is what a .parquet store file opens with; PyArrow reads one file with an index held in memory, and is asked for with type=pyarrow. Both refuse writes, which is the storage rather than a setting. Files is a directory with one file per key, which is what outrage export already wrote: the tree a person edits by hand, readable as a store rather than only as a transfer. PostgreSQL, experimental for now, is the one store that is not on this machine: read-write, shared by every device that can reach the server, and asked for with type=postgres.
• Client integrations - packaged project skills and agents for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI and GitHub Copilot CLI, plus a session-start hook for each. They cover when to store and retrieve, the key conventions, and the moment a skill would not be reached on its own. outrage init installs each client's files without replacing configuration it does not own.
• Event log - an optional JSON lines record of the requests made and the store accesses beneath them, for answering afterwards what a session actually did. Off unless outrage config --log or outrage-server --log asks for it.
• Backup - outrage backup copies the database through SQLite and checks what it wrote. In the library rather than the tool, because a store in WAL mode keeps recent writes in a sidecar file and copying the .sqlite alone yields a near-empty database that still opens cleanly. A PostgreSQL store is copied into a local SQLite file instead, so the backup opens with no server.

Parquet stores

Outrage also supports read-only data stores in Parquet format, written by outrage pack with pyarrow and read through DuckDB. Because those are optional dependencies, support isn't included by default.

Install the extra to add Parquet support:

pip install "outrage[parquet]"

A .parquet store file is one packed file, or a pattern over many. A reference base too large for one file, or that arrives in pieces, is read as Parquet parts in any order:

outrage-server --mount-ro ref=reference.parquet

outrage-server --mount-ro ref=parts/*.parquet

outrage-server --mount-ro ref=parts,type=duckdb

The last reads every .parquet file directly inside a directory, which has no extension to say which backend it needs. type=pyarrow reads a single file with pyarrow instead, which is also what still opens a file written by outrage before 0.4.0.

A shared PostgreSQL store

Experimental. It works, and has been run against a local server and a managed one on Amazon RDS, but it is new: its configuration and behaviour may still change in a minor release, which the stable interfaces of 1.0 do not.

One store, on a server, shared by every device that can reach it - a laptop and a desktop working from the same memory rather than from two that drift. It needs the extra:

pip install "outrage[postgres]"

The connection details are not outrage's to hold. A mount names a libpq connection service file - the standard file psql and everything else that speaks libpq already read - and an entry in it:

# ~/.pg_service.conf
[outrage]
host=db.example.com
dbname=memory
user=me
sslmode=verify-full

outrage-server --mount shared=~/.pg_service.conf,type=postgres

The file may be absolute or start with ~, unlike every other backend's store file, which is a name inside --dir: this one is a connection's configuration rather than the store, and the standard place for it is the home directory. Leave it out entirely - --mount shared=,type=postgres - for libpq's own lookup. service=NAME names a different entry; the default is outrage.

The store is the connection's schema, so one database holds as many stores as you like, each asked for with libpq's own spelling:

options=-csearch_path=memory

The schema and its tables are created on first open. outrage schema status reports the version a store is at and what this build would do with it, and outrage schema create --version N makes a blank one at a chosen version - for a team whose oldest client is behind. A client never migrates a shared store by opening it: it operates at the version it finds, and changing that is a command somebody runs.

Keep the password out of the service file. libpq reads ~/.pgpass on every connection, so a line there is all a password needs, and an entry can name another file with passfile=; PGPASSWORD works too. The file must be readable by you alone (chmod 600), and a : or \ in the password is escaped with a \:

# ~/.pgpass - host:port:database:user:password
db.example.com:5432:memory:me:the-password

No password ever appears in output, wherever it is kept: outrage info, outrage check, outrage schema status and every error report name the service, host, database, user and schema, and show any secret as (not shown).

Verify the server, not only the encryption. sslmode=require encrypts but accepts any certificate; verify-full checks that the certificate names the host and was issued by an authority you trust. Those authorities are read from ~/.postgresql/root.crt unless the entry names a file with sslrootcert - give it an absolute path, which every libpq client reads the same way - and sslrootcert=system trusts the operating system's store, which covers a server with a public certificate. A managed server often has its own authority instead: for Amazon RDS it is AWS's bundle, https://truststore.pki.rds.amazonaws.com/global/global-bundle.pem, saved locally. Two things about RDS in particular:

• The cluster's security group has to admit you. A new cluster in the VPC's default group admits nothing from outside it, and a connection simply times out, which outrage reports as a server it cannot reach.
• Use a password, not IAM authentication. An IAM token lasts fifteen minutes and libpq cannot fetch a new one, so it would stop working at the first reconnect. And a password in an RDS-managed secret is rotated, weekly by default, which leaves every device's .pgpass stale: give outrage a login role with a password of its own.

outrage check shared reports the schema version, its floors and the state of the store; outrage backup shared writes a consistent snapshot into a local .sqlite file, which opens, mounts and checks with no server at all.

A server that cannot be reached leaves that mount unavailable and every other mount working, so a laptop off the network still starts outrage-server and still runs outrage commands, with the same mount configuration. Each command warns on stderr about every mount it could not open. Nothing below an unavailable mount can be read or written until it opens again: a write there is refused rather than landing in another store, a listing shows the mount as unavailable mount, a survey or search leaves it out and says so, and a recursive delete, copy or export that would cross it is refused. A service file that cannot be read, a login the server rejects, or a database that is not there is a mistake in the configuration and stops the command or the start instead.