OpenLore

📜 OpenLore

Sponsored by

Serve your docs to AI agents over SSH.

OpenLore is a minimal, extensible, agent-native knowledge base that keeps shared context current and inspectable.

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About

AI coding agents already know how to explore files with ls, cat, grep, find, pipes, and shell loops. OpenLore gives them that same interface over SSH, backed by your documentation instead of a real machine.

Agent ──SSH or MCP──▶ OpenLore ──▶ docs, knowledge, and artifacts

It starts as a single-binary, zero-config, read-only documentation server. When you need a live knowledge base, you can add identity-scoped access, controlled publishing, atomic writes, validation, and human approval without changing how agents read or navigate the content.

Store and retrieve Markdown

Put documentation, runbooks, project context, or agent-authored notes in ordinary Markdown files. There is no ingestion pipeline: point OpenLore at a directory and it serves the existing hierarchy directly. Organize documents with folders, connect them with standard Markdown links, and group them into docsets when different people or agents need different access. OpenLore is read-only by default; enable writing when you want agents to create and update Markdown too.

Quick Start

The fastest path is to let your agent set up OpenLore:

# Teach your agent how to install, configure, and bundle OpenLore
ssh openlore.sh teach | your-agent-cli

# Add documentation access instructions to AGENTS.md
ssh openlore.sh agents >> AGENTS.md

Or install and run it directly:

go install github.com/aakarim/go-openlore/cmd/openlore@latest

openlore ./docs

ssh -p 2222 localhost
ssh -p 2222 localhost "grep -r 'authentication' /docs"

By default this starts:

• SSH on localhost:2222
• the human-facing web view on http://localhost:8080
• MCP over HTTP on http://localhost:8080/mcp

See Installation for more ways to install and package OpenLore.

Features

• Agent-native retrieval — Agents use the shell tools and composition patterns they already understand instead of learning a bespoke retrieval API.
• One knowledge surface, multiple transports — Serve the same virtual filesystem over SSH, SFTP/SSHFS, MCP, and a human-friendly web view.
• Live, governed knowledge — Keep content read-only, allow scoped publishing, or enable full writes per docset. Writes are atomic, conflict-aware, and can require human approval.
• Identity-scoped views — Give each person or agent only the docsets it needs, with role-based ro, publish, and rw grants, path aliases, and private home directories.
• Safe by construction — The shell is an in-memory Go interpreter, not a real operating-system shell. There is no shell escape, arbitrary process execution, or ambient network access in a normal session.
• Portable knowledge bundles — Embed docs into a self-contained binary, build cross-platform bundles with the GitHub Action, or package them as a desktop MCP extension.
• Structured knowledge without a new query language — Inspect frontmatter as NDJSON with lore meta, query it with jq, and validate Google's Open Knowledge Format (OKF) bundles and Agent Skills close to the write path.
• Extensible policy and processing — Plugins can add validation, grants, read/write middleware, metadata, and post-commit processing while preserving the same filesystem interface.

Use Cases

• Continuous Learning repository - store sessions and learnings in one shared server. Add metrics so you can optimise. Allow agents to share learnings with each other while maintaining user isolation.
• Team Artifact Repository - share markdown, HTML, JSON, Excel etc. documents you've created while maintaining access controls. Much more natural than git, more agent-native than Confluence/Notion.
• Documentation for coding agents — Put internal API docs, runbooks, product context, and architecture notes behind a familiar, greppable interface.
• A shared live memory for teams of agents — Give agents separate or shared docsets so they can publish findings, hand off work, and accumulate durable context across sessions.
• Public docs site - add any files to your public docset, enable public access and it will be shown to any agent that stumbles across your site. Improves AEO/GEO with no need to edit your existing docs.
• Skills sharing — Publish Agent Skills into shared collections so every authorized agent can discover and use the same governed procedures.
• Agent Plugins repository — Version-pin Agent Plugins repos from GitHub and serve them to your team's agents. Skills packaged in the open standard stay current automatically.
• Governed knowledge contribution — Let contributors publish into inboxes while reserving sensitive paths for approvers and preventing accidental overwrites.
• Remote review of agent artifacts — Expose reports, logs, screenshots, and generated files through the browser or SSH without building a custom artifact viewer or granting access to the agent's machine.
• Identity-specific workspaces — Mount a private home for each agent plus shared team knowledge, all through one server and one authorization model.
• Portable customer or project knowledge — Ship a versioned executable with the relevant docs embedded, or distribute the same knowledge as an MCPB desktop extension.
• Validated knowledge catalogs — Enforce frontmatter and bundle conventions, inspect metadata cheaply, and stop malformed knowledge at admission time.

How It Works

OpenLore is built on Wish for SSH transport. A connection is handled entirely against a virtual filesystem:

1. Authenticate — connect keylessly or resolve an SSH key, certificate, passkey, or OAuth login to an identity.
2. Compose a view — mount only the docsets and paths granted to that identity.
3. Explore — run shell commands implemented as pure Go functions over that view, or use the equivalent MCP shell tool.
4. Contribute safely — if writing is enabled, authorize and validate a whole-file change before committing it atomically or routing it for approval.

OAuth clients use delegated identities, so durable write provenance distinguishes direct work by adil from work performed as adil/claude@claude.ai. Delegates can inherit no more authority than their principal and can be narrowed by docset and capability deny lists. CIMD clients can additionally authenticate with vendor-hosted metadata and private_key_jwt; see Authenticated OAuth Clients.

The normal shell cannot invoke bash, exec, curl, or arbitrary host processes. Embedded documentation is always read-only. Explicitly trusted identities can be granted narrowly scoped asynchronous processing through the spawn capability.

Governed Writing

OpenLore is read-only by default. Writable deployments keep a single, policy-controlled write path for redirects, append, tee, patch, sed -i, file moves, publishing, and approved external jobs.

echo "# Research" | publish backend findings.md
cat change.diff | patch /backend/api.md
sed -i 's/old/new/g' /backend/runbook.md

Writes are whole-object atomic swaps. Compare-and-swap protection rejects stale edits by default, docset grants constrain the target, and selected paths can produce reviewable changesets under /requests instead of committing directly.

See Writing and publishing for user-facing setup and Write system internals for the implementation model.

Installation

Install with Go

Requires Go 1.26 or later:

go install github.com/aakarim/go-openlore/cmd/openlore@latest

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/aakarim/go-openlore.git
cd go-openlore
go build -o openlore ./cmd/openlore

Embed docs in a binary

Place documentation in assets/lore/ and build. The resulting binary contains the docs and serves them read-only at /docs when run with no directory argument:

go build -o my-docs ./cmd/openlore

Build with the GitHub Action

Produce cross-platform binaries with your docs embedded:

- uses: aakarim/openlore@v1
  with:
    docs-dir: ./docs
    config: ./openlore.yml

See Ways to use OpenLore for MCP stdio, MCPB desktop packaging, SSHFS, and Go library usage.

Create a customized deployment

Use the bundled setup skill to create <team>-lore, a small customer-owned repository containing openlore.yml, a thin Containerfile pinned to an official OpenLore release, and deployment artifacts. It builds a working local server and verifies HTTP, MCP, authenticated SSH, writes, and persistence before deployment:

ssh openlore.sh setup | amp

The generated repository keeps initial lore.json policy and SSH-visible files under gitignored .local/. The first deployment initializes an empty persistent volume from that state. Root openlore.yml remains the Git/IaC authority and is deployed separately to /var/lib/openlore/config/openlore.yml; it is not baked into the image. Later lore.json and filesystem edits on the server are authoritative and are never overwritten by image updates.

Additional instruction commands support the full lifecycle:

• onboarding adds initial identities, roles, homes, and folders locally;
• deploy selects Fly.io, Railway, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean, or a custom deployment and verifies a shared persistence/networking contract;
• upgrade prepares only the pinned base-image version change so existing CD can deploy it.

Provider deployments require HTTPS/MCP, authenticated OpenLore SSH, administrative shell access, and a persistent /var/lib/openlore volume. Where the provider supports it, deployment configures public port 22 to forward to OpenLore port 2222. Otherwise it reports the assigned port and recommends an external TCP forwarding system.

The published container contains only OpenLore. It deliberately contains no onboarding policy or server configuration. Before the service starts, the deployment must put openlore.yml and lore.json in the persistent config directory and run:

./out --config /var/lib/openlore/config/openlore.yml

This keeps configuration independently deployable: a simple deployment can copy openlore.yml onto the volume, while Kubernetes can project the same file from a ConfigMap. Use the deploy skill for Fly.io, Railway, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean, or custom infrastructure. The repository's Railpack and Fly files provide the image, persistent-volume, and port wiring; they do not seed or mutate configuration at process startup.

Railway assigns its SSH TCP proxy a public hostname and port. Standard SSH port 22 requires an external raw TCP load balancer. Fly.io can map public port 22 to OpenLore's internal port 2222 with a dedicated address. Raw SSH has no hostname or SNI routing, so one listener cannot route multiple domains on port 22.

The container workflow publishes latest from main; releases also publish VERSION, vVERSION, major, and minor image tags.

HTTP inbox uploads

Configure a docset inbox and a role with its publish grant, then create a credential for an existing identity (the server configuration must name auth_file so the CLI can validate it):

openlore inbox token create --identity alice --label webhook --config openlore.yml
curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer olin_ID_SECRET' -H 'Content-Type: text/markdown' \
  --data-binary @note.md 'https://docs.example.com/inbox/docs?name=note.md'

POST /inbox/{docset} accepts bearer credentials or an exact-body HMAC using X-OpenLore-Token-Id and X-OpenLore-Signature. OAuth access tokens are used only for POST/GET /inbox/tokens and DELETE /inbox/tokens/{id}; inbox credentials are separate and revocable. See Configuration and identity.

Documentation

Guide	Contents
Ways to use OpenLore	SSH, MCP, web, SSHFS, embedded binaries, GitHub Action, MCPB, and library usage
Command reference	Complete shell, introspection, publishing, syntax, CLI command, and flag reference
Configuration and identity	openlore.yml, authentication, roles, docsets, aliases, homes, and host verification
Workload identity federation	Authenticate CI and agents with short-lived external identity tokens
Writing and publishing	Write modes, inboxes, conflict handling, approvals, and jobs
Plugins and knowledge formats	Plugin installation, interfaces, OKF validation, lore validate, and lore meta
Write system internals	Filesystem layering, write seam, changesets, hooks, and async jobs
Security evaluation	Threat model and security properties

Security

• Commands run in a pure-Go interpreter, not through os/exec.
• The virtual filesystem cleans paths and enforces docset boundaries.
• Allowed file patterns and ignored directories keep secrets out of the view.
• RBAC controls reads, publishing, writes, approvals, and trusted capabilities.
• The web endpoint can publish the SSH host key over TLS to avoid blind trust on first use; SSH user and host certificates are also supported.

See SECURITY.md for the full security evaluation.

License

MIT — Adil Karim

OpenLore bundles third-party open-source components. Their licenses and required notices are listed in assets/legal/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md, with full license texts in assets/legal/licenses/. These are embedded in the binary and served by the running service at /legal.