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Installing Hostwarden

The short path is in the README. This page has the details behind each prerequisite and the setup for Windows.

Prerequisites​

  • An AI coding assistant that runs in the terminal — e.g. Claude Code or OpenCode — or the Claude desktop app's Code tab, set up as described in Claude Code Desktop.

  • jq for Claude Code's guard hooks. Without it they cannot read what a tool call does, and the mode guard refuses whatever it cannot show to be safe.

  • SSH access to the target server — either as a normal user or as root. The SSH connection must not prompt for a password or passphrase (use key-based authentication without a passphrase). This is not needed for local administration (localhost / your own machine).

    Hostwarden shares one SSH connection per host and keeps it open for 10 minutes after the last call. The sockets live in ~/.cache/hostwarden (mode 0700), so any process of your local user can use an open connection without asking for the key again.

    Quick setup: generate a key with ssh-keygen, copy it to the server with ssh-copy-id user@host, and test with ssh user@host. See the Arch wiki SSH keys guide for details.

  • Linux (any distribution), FreeBSD, or macOS on the target machines; these can also be managed locally without SSH. Windows Server is a target over SSH only, mostly read-only (rules/os/windows.md); a Windows workstation runs Hostwarden in WSL 2, under Windows.

  • A checkout that supports symbolic links. Hostwarden uses them in two load-bearing places: .claude/skills links to .agents/skills/, and DNS aliases become symlinks under memory/machines/. macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and WSL handle them out of the box; a clone without them is repaired as described under Symbolic links. A session-start hook says so whenever the skills are out of reach, because a session without them is otherwise silent about it; sh tests/instructions.sh reports the state at any time.

  • Workstation: Linux, macOS or FreeBSD, and on Windows a WSL 2 distribution — see Windows.

  • Local tools. bin/hostwarden-doctor lists what Hostwarden needs on your workstation, what is missing, and the command to install it.

Windows​

Hostwarden runs in a WSL 2 distribution, never on Windows itself. Inside WSL it runs exactly as on Linux, with nothing extra to set up.

  1. Install WSL 2 with Ubuntu, Microsoft's default and the distribution this page assumes. It needs Windows 10 version 2004 or later, or Windows 11. In a PowerShell run as administrator: 
    wsl --install
    Then restart Windows. Where WSL is already installed, this prints its help instead; install the distribution with wsl --install -d Ubuntu (wsl --list --online shows the names). A distribution still on WSL 1 (wsl --list --verbose shows the version) converts with wsl --set-version Ubuntu 2.
  2. Open Ubuntu, create the Linux user it asks for, and install git and jq: 
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install git jq
    bin/hostwarden-doctor names the rest once the clone is there.
  3. Clone into the distribution's own filesystem — under ~, not under /mnt/c — as the README describes.
  4. Give the distribution an SSH key it can use. The ssh inside WSL does not see Windows' ssh-agent or a password manager's agent on Windows. Either keep a key in ~/.ssh inside the distribution, or relay the Windows agent into WSL with a tool built for that. Pointing ssh at Windows' ssh.exe does not work: it cannot share a connection, and in a development checkout the guard refuses it.
  5. Start Claude Code or OpenCode inside the distribution. In the Claude desktop app, pick the distribution in the Code tab's environment picker (Claude Code Desktop in WSL).

bin/hostwarden-doctor checks steps 3 and 4 inside WSL.

Git Bash, PowerShell and cmd.exe are not supported as the shell Hostwarden itself runs in. The guard hooks are POSIX shell scripts, neither Windows' own OpenSSH nor Git Bash's ssh can share a connection (ControlMaster), and Claude Code's PowerShell tool would bypass every guard. .claude/settings.json therefore denies the PowerShell tool, and bin/hostwarden-doctor reports a native Windows shell as a required item missing.

When git cannot create a link, it writes a small text file holding the target path instead, without an error. .claude/skills then leads nowhere, and Hostwarden runs without a single skill. To repair a clone, allow links for it — it may have recorded core.symlinks=false for itself — and check the result; no output means it is fine:

git config core.symlinks true
rm .claude/skills
git checkout -- .claude/skills
sh .claude/hooks/check-skills.sh

An archive download (ZIP) cannot be repaired this way, because it is no git clone: clone the repository instead.

A DNS alias that became a directory rather than a link (ls -l memory/machines/ shows which) has its own copy of the machine memory. It has diverged from the canonical host's and has to be merged back by hand before the directory is replaced with a link.