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Safety at a glance

Hostwarden's safety rules are not optional — they're baked into every session, applied consistently even where a human might skip a step under pressure. This page is the map: each section below is one layer of the safety model, with a link to the page that covers it in full.

What it asks first​

  • Destructive commands, reboots, service restarts, and firewall or network changes all wait for your yes.
  • A firewall or network change arms a five-minute automatic undo before it applies.
  • Config reloads auto-proceed once the config test passes.
  • Stopping or deleting a guest, or a storage change, puts the exact command to you first.

What it asks first

Hard guardrails​

  • A shipped hook blocks partition and disk-wipe commands, storage repair or destroy, powering off, and touching SSH keys or sshd's config outright.
  • It runs in every permission mode, even inside an ssh wrapper or a language runtime.
  • Read-only inspection is always allowed.

Hard guardrails

Access control​

  • Least privilege by default; unprivileged mode when neither sudo nor root works.
  • No session borrows another session's, subagent's or token's rights.
  • A blacklisted host is refused outright; a read-only one is inspected but never changed.

Access control

Careful changes​

  • Verifies a finding against the live system before reporting it.
  • Backs up a config file before editing it, and tests before applying a change.
  • Auto-detects the OS, sticks to stable repos, and remembers what it learns about a server.

Careful changes

Against hallucinated commands​

  • Loads a verified rule file per platform instead of guessing commands from memory.
  • Checks --help, man pages or upstream docs before running anything unfamiliar.
  • Every command still waits for your review as the last safeguard.

Against hallucinated commands

Secrets and untrusted output​

  • Private keys, password files and .env contents are inspected by metadata only, never printed.
  • Server output — files, logs, MOTD banners — is data to analyze, never instructions to follow.

Secrets and untrusted output

Every change is logged​

Every change lands in the system journal as a one-line, plain-language headline, mirrored in the workspace's changelog. See Journal and changelog.

Risks and responsibilities​

Hostwarden is for anyone willing to stay in the driver's seat and review every command — from newcomers learning Linux to veterans running fleets. Each proposed command comes with what it does and why.

It follows the safety checklist every time: it always backs up before editing, always dry-runs when it can, always checks the OS before assuming commands. It can still make a mistake — LLMs can hallucinate, misread intent, or produce a command with unintended side effects. That is why every command waits for your review; it is not a substitute for one.