Features

What Hostwarden does, with example prompts. A feature that exists only in Claude Code says so; in other tools the same rules reach the agent as instructions.

Knowing your hosts

• Onboarding a host — detects the OS on first connection and builds the host's memory.
• Names and aliases — recognizes when several DNS names point at the same server.
• A host's network — the network profile, VPNs, and out-of-band access recorded for a host.

Supported systems

• Supported systems — the OS families, appliances, platforms, and roles Hostwarden tells apart.
• Appliances — special handling for Proxmox VE, OPNsense, Synology DSM, and other appliances.
• WSL and workstations — how a WSL instance or a workstation is treated differently from a server.
• Windows Server — read-only housekeeping and security reporting over OpenSSH.
• Local administration — runs commands directly on the machine Hostwarden runs on, without SSH.

Checking servers

• Housekeeping checks — routine health inspection: disk, updates, services, hardware, and more.
• Security audit — checks SSH hardening, firewall posture, accounts, and other settings.
• Server baseline — what every server is expected to have, and how to bring one up to it.
• Disks, ZFS and btrfs — tracks disks by serial and rates ZFS and btrfs settings.
• Fleet audit — compares key policies across every server Hostwarden knows about.

Changing servers

• Plan mode — plans a complex or unfamiliar change before touching anything.
• Configuration management — works alongside Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and similar tools.
• Services in containers — changes the file that recreates a container, not the running one.
• Accounts — creates and removes accounts, groups, and sudo rules the way each host manages them.
• Files Hostwarden deploys — keeps a master copy of every script and config file it writes.
• Renaming a host — finds everywhere the old name is used before renaming a host.
• Language runtimes and deploy users — installs language runtimes and sets up restricted CI/CD accounts.
• Email reports — sends ad-hoc text or files about a managed server by email.

Many servers

• One task on many hosts — runs one question, check, or change across several servers at once.
• What a reboot would hit — answers from memory what a reboot or restart would take down.
• Planning a maintenance window — plans a disruptive step ahead, with who to tell and by when.
• Fleet read — gives an operations host a key limited to read-only checks.

Guests and hypervisors

• Hypervisors and their guests — lists and reads inside the guests of every hypervisor it manages.
• Changing a guest — prefers a snapshot before a risky change, and asks before stop or delete.
• New guests — creates VMs and containers with the server baseline applied at first boot.
• Installing an operating system — replaces an OS, sets up dual-boot, and manages EFI boot entries.

SSH access

• Host keys — checks every server's SSH host key against the workspace's known_hosts file.
• SSH certificates and your CA — audits an existing SSH CA and uses it wherever it sets up SSH trust.
• Reaching a host — configures SSH options, jump hosts, and alternative ports for each server.

The safety rules behind all of this are in Safety at a glance. What Hostwarden remembers between sessions, and how, is in How Hostwarden remembers.