yadgar — the client

One binary. yaadgaar login obtains a credential, yaadgaar serve is the MCP server your agent spawns, and everything else manages the machine it runs on (D75, D76).

The command is yaadgaar, and the doubled vowels are not a typo. The Python client this replaces already owns yadgar on PATH, so the transitional client differs in both the PyPI project and the executable — the reasoning is written over BINARY_NAME in src/install/hooks.rs.

Decisions are recorded in yadgarhq/docs — D75 (the proxy that knows no tools), D76 (one binary, and a rules file that is referenced rather than spliced), D72 (the credential), D16 (why the gateway is the only thing that speaks MCP inward).

What it is

A proxy, and deliberately nothing more. tools/list is forwarded to the gateway and its answer returned verbatim; so is tools/call. There is no per-tool code in this repository at all — not a match arm, not a registry, not a feature flag.

That is the boundary rather than an economy. A list the client asserts is a list the client is trusted to filter honestly; forwarding makes the gateway's answer the only answer, and the gateway resolves identity before it replies. It is also what keeps releases uncoupled: this binary lives on people's laptops and the gateway does not, so a client that enumerated tools would make the tool set move at the speed of the slowest machine.

When the gateway is unreachable at spawn, the last tool list is served from cache and calls fail with a plain "gateway unreachable" — because an empty list is indistinguishable from yadgar not being installed, and the agent would silently lose its tasks with nothing to report.

Commands

enrol (first machine) or login (any other), then install, is the whole setup, and verify is the one to schedule. The project key is read once, from the directory the session was started in (D53) — see Getting started — so one registration serves every repository.

Unattended provisioning

login and enrol are interactive by default: three prompts each, and rpassword reads the password straight off the controlling terminal rather than stdin. A machine with no terminal to answer those prompts — a VM image, a container build, a config-management run — cannot use either command as they stand. Both take flags that remove every prompt:

A fully unattended login:

printf '%s\n' "$PASSWORD" | yaadgaar login --gateway https://gateway.yadgar.internal:18443 \
  --username someone --password-stdin

Add --ca-file /path/to/ca.pem when the deployment uses a private CA and this machine never enrolled. The CA is trusted in addition to the system roots and stored with the credential.

A fully unattended enrolment:

printf '%s\n' "$NEW_PASSWORD" | yaadgaar enrol --token-file /path/to/token --password-stdin

printf '%s\n', not echo. Under dash (Debian/Ubuntu's /bin/sh) and some other shells, a bare echo interprets backslash escapes in its argument by default — a password containing \n, \t, or similar is silently truncated or rewritten before it ever reaches this client. printf '%s\n' never interprets its argument at all.

--password-stdin requires --gateway and --username on login. Without them, the prompts those two flags remove would still read stdin themselves — consuming the very lines meant for the password. enrol similarly requires the token as the positional argument or via --token-file when --password-stdin is given: the interactive "paste the enrolment token" fallback also reads stdin, and --password-stdin has already claimed it for the password.

The password is read as exactly one line: the first, with its trailing line ending stripped. It is never trimmed — a password can legitimately start, end, or consist of whitespace — and an empty result is refused.

--password-stdin refuses a terminal, unlike docker login, which accepts one. rpassword is used everywhere else in this client precisely so a password is never echoed and never reaches scrollback; reading one off a real terminal through this flag would type it in plain sight instead of concealing it, which is the exact leak this flag exists to close. Redirect input from a file or a pipe.

Nothing about the interactive path changes when none of these flags are given.

Resetting a password

An administrator issues a new enrolment token; the person redeems it and chooses the new password. The administrator never learns it.

1. Find the user's id. A new user gets one from the gateway's /admin/create-user; the gateway has no lookup by username.

2. Issue the token with your own administrator credential:

   yaadgaar admin issue-enrolment --user-id "$USER_ID" --out reset.token --revoke-existing
   

   --out writes a new 0600 file and refuses an existing one. Leave out --revoke-existing to keep the user's other machines logged in.

3. Hand reset.token over out of band. The person runs:

   yaadgaar enrol --token-file reset.token
   

Revocation happens at redemption, not at issue. The user's old credentials keep working until the person runs enrol with the token. The token is single-use and expires in 24 hours.

Installing

pipx install yaadgaar

Measured with pipx install yaadgaar==0.1.2 on a fresh Debian VM. pip install yaadgaar installs the same wheel, which holds only the binary. To move to a newer release, pipx install --force yaadgaar==<version>.

Getting started

1. Enrol, on the first machine, with the enrolment token an admin gave you. enrol sets your password, prints your username, and stores the gateway address, the credential and, on a private deployment, the CA to trust — the same config login writes. No login is needed afterwards.

   yaadgaar enrol --token-file /path/to/token
   

   Unattended, with the new password on stdin (see Unattended provisioning):

   printf '%s\n' "$NEW_PASSWORD" | yaadgaar enrol --token-file /path/to/token --password-stdin
   

   On any further machine, yaadgaar login with that username and password. For a deployment with a private CA, pass the CA's PEM file with --ca-file /path/to/ca.pem; login stores it with the credential, as enrol stores the CA its token carries.

2. Install, once per machine. This registers yadgar with Claude Code at user level: one hook in ~/.claude/settings.json (the PreToolUse guard, yaadgaar hook pre-tool-guard; an install over 0.1.4 or older removes the eleven inert hook entries those versions wrote, and never touches another tool's hooks), the MCP entry in ~/.claude.json under the key yaadgaar (tools appear as mcp__yaadgaar__*; an existing entry under that key that this client did not write makes install refuse, and the separate yadgar key is never touched), and the rules file ~/.claude/yadgar-rules.md, referenced from ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md by the line @<home>/.claude/yadgar-rules.md (absolute path, matched exactly). If that line is already anywhere in CLAUDE.md, install leaves the file alone; otherwise it adds the line at the top. If CLAUDE.md is a symlink (for example nix-managed), install never edits it: when the line is missing it prints the exact line to add to whatever generates the file, and finishes the rest of the install. If claude is not on PATH it says so and registers anyway.

   yaadgaar install
   

3. Name the project. Each call carries a project key, read once when the agent starts yaadgaar serve, from the directory the session starts in: the first .yadgar/project-id file found walking up from it, otherwise the git origin remote reduced to owner/repo. With neither, no key is sent and the gateway refuses calls that need one; the client adds a reason to that refusal that names .yadgar/project-id. A deployment that enforces project registration also refuses a key it does not know, and this client has no command that registers one.

   mkdir -p .yadgar && printf '%s\n' 'owner/repo' > .yadgar/project-id
   

4. Verify, now and on a schedule. It exits non-zero when the installed environment has drifted from what install left.

   yaadgaar verify
   

The config lives in ~/.config/yaadgaar/ (the OS config directory on macOS and Windows; YAADGAAR_CONFIG_DIR overrides it). On Linux and macOS, config.json and its directory are owner-only; on Windows the client sets no permissions and relies on the profile directory's own.

Up to 0.1.4 the config lived in ~/.config/yadgar/, which is also where the yadgar memory engine keeps its config.yaml and secrets.env. This client no longer reads, writes or moves anything there. If it finds its old config.json or tools-cache.json there and no new config, install, verify and serve print a hint: run yaadgaar login (or yaadgaar enrol) again. A new login mints a new install id.

The guard reads disabled_guards from ~/.claude/yadgar-hook-exceptions.json, the file the memory engine's own guard reads, and never writes it. It honours three ids, spelled as the engine spells them: terraform_family (terraform, tofu, tfp and digger comments), git_commit_flags (commits that skip hooks or signing) and hook_config_tamper (writes to that file). Every other id is ignored. A missing, unreadable or malformed file leaves every guard on.

Packaging

Rust, shipped to PyPI as wheels via maturin. The language follows the rest of the system; the channel follows the people already using it, and a pip-installable command is not a thing a rewrite gets to take away. A plain GitHub-release binary was rejected for exactly that reason.

The wheel carries the compiled binary and no Python at all — bindings = "bin" in pyproject.toml — so import yaadgaar is not a thing and is not meant to be.

A wheel is per-platform, so there are six: Linux, macOS and Windows, each on x86_64 and aarch64. Every one is built on a runner of its own architecture rather than cross-compiled, and release.yaml refuses to publish unless all six are present — shipping the four that built would leave two platforms silently installing an older version.

Development

cargo build
cargo test
pre-commit run --all-files

There is no Containerfile and no chart here: this repository is not a service, and what it ships is a wheel. CI is the shared workflow in yadgarhq/actions, which detects that and skips the image, chart and proto stages (D62).

To build a wheel locally:

maturin build --release   # → target/wheels/, for THIS machine only

The other five targets are built by .github/workflows/release.yaml, which is this repository's one piece of local CI. The reason it is not in yadgarhq/actions with everything else is written at the top of that file.