Decisions

A decision records a choice you made about your servers, with the reason: pve1 gets no local firewall, a key stays unrotated, the UniFi devices get no SSO. Hostwarden then stops proposing what the decision rules out, and flags a host that contradicts it.

 ❯ pve1 never gets a local firewall — the router guest filters
   everything, and rules on the bridges broke guest traffic.

How one is made

• Only your explicit word makes a decision. Hostwarden never records one from a pattern it noticed. It offers to when you turn a proposal down with a reason, and writes on your yes.
• It records who, when, why and what it covers: one host, a cluster, or a group of hosts.
• Only you retire one. Say so, and Hostwarden deletes it, and the override that goes with it. The workspace's history keeps the old text. A Revisit: date brings it up once.

What it changes

An audit shows the matching finding as decided instead of proposing it again. In a housekeeping report:

Firewall   DECIDED — No local firewall (user, 2026-09-18)

A host that contradicts a decision that covers it is flagged. The Critical Safety Rules cannot be decided away, just as they cannot be overridden.

Where it is written

For	File
One host	memory/machines/<hostname>/decisions.md
A cluster	memory/clusters/<name>/decisions.md
A group, or all hosts	memory/decisions/<name>.md

# Decisions — pve1.example.com

## No local firewall
- Decided: alice, 2026-09-18
- Why: the router guest filters everything; rules on the
  bridges broke guest traffic.
- Settles: baseline → Firewall; proposals to enable one

• Longer reasoning — the options you weighed, the numbers behind it — goes into a file beside the decision file, in a directory of the same name without .md (machines/<hostname>/decisions/<name>.md under memory/ for a host), and the entry names it in a Details: line. Hostwarden reads it only when the decision is in question.
• A group file says which hosts it covers in its second line, never wrapped however long it gets: Applies to: all, a line from the hosts' memory (Applies to: Appliance: Proxmox VE), or a list (Applies to: hosts web1.example.com, web2.example.com).

Decisions and overrides

A decision is not an override: it records a choice about your servers, while an override changes what Hostwarden does. Where a decision also has to change Hostwarden's behaviour, it gets an override too, whose first line points back at it:

Decision: Reboots by hand only (decisions/databases.md)

The reason then stays in the decision (Overrides). The rules behind it: rules/decisions.md.