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Version: 1.x

Glossary

Checkouts and the workspace​

  • Workspace — memory/, a git repository of its own beside the Hostwarden checkout that holds everything Hostwarden learned and everything you told it. The workspace
  • Operations checkout — a checkout whose memory/ is the workspace. It administers servers; Hostwarden's own files are read-only there. The operations checkout
  • Development checkout — a checkout without a workspace, and every git worktree. It works on Hostwarden itself and reaches no server. Working on Hostwarden
  • Shared workspace — a workspace with a private git remote, shared by a team or by one person on several machines. A shared workspace
  • Operator handle — the short name, such as alice, that opens every journal line you cause and every decision you record. A shared workspace
  • Operations host — an always-on machine that runs the fleet's housekeeping unattended and reads your servers only through fleet read. An operations host

What it records​

  • Host memory — a host's directory under memory/machines/, with memory.md at its heart. A host's memory
  • Journal line — the one-sentence headline of a change, written into the server's own journal under the tag hostwarden. Journal and changelog
  • Local changelog — changelog.log in the host's memory: each journal headline with the detail, verification and rollback. Journal and changelog
  • Activity check — the read of a host's journal on every connection, which shows you what happened there in the last seven days. Journal and changelog
  • Watcher — a script that logs under a session tag (hostwarden, heinzel); reported apart from the work of people. Journal and changelog
  • Decision — a choice you made about your servers, with the reason, which stops Hostwarden from proposing what it rules out. Decisions
  • Plan — work that spans sessions, in memory/plans/; deleted once done. To-do lists and plans
  • Master — the copy in the workspace of a file Hostwarden wrote onto a server, kept at the same path it has on the host. Files Hostwarden deploys
  • Map — a Mermaid diagram under memory/maps/, drawn from memory by bin/hostwarden-map, never by hand. Infrastructure maps

How it works on a host​

  • First-connection pipeline — the ordered steps before the first command on any host: access lists, DNS aliases, SSH user, host key, OS detection, machine memory, activity check, Heinzel legacy. Your first session
  • Onboarding — a full, read-only first probe of a host, on request, ending with what it lacks against the baseline. Onboarding a host
  • Local mode — administration of the machine Hostwarden runs on, without SSH, as your own user. Local administration
  • Unprivileged mode — work as the current user where neither sudo nor root SSH is available, with a report of what needs root. Access control
  • Via-host mode — reaching a guest that has no SSH server of its own through its hypervisor's manager. Hypervisors and their guests
  • Appliance — a system with its own updater, configuration and firewall, such as Proxmox VE or OPNsense, which gets a rule file of its own. Appliances
  • Platform — what the OS runs inside when something outside owns part of the machine; WSL is one. WSL and workstations
  • Role — what a machine is expected to have. A Mac, a WSL instance and the machine Hostwarden runs on are workstations, held to other expectations than a server. WSL and workstations
  • Guest — a VM, system container or jail on a hypervisor. Hypervisors and their guests

Checks​

  • Baseline — what every server is expected to have, written down in rules/baseline.md, plus your own additions. Server baseline
  • Housekeeping — the routine health inspection of a host; it changes nothing. Housekeeping checks
  • Security audit — findings on SSH, firewall, accounts, services and hardening, by severity. Security audit
  • Fleet audit — a side-by-side comparison of key policies across every host, to show drift. Fleet audit
  • Fleet read — the way an operations host reads a server: its key may run a bundle of read-only checks you signed and write one journal line, nothing else. Fleet read

Changes and safety​

  • Override — a file you write under memory/custom-rules/ or in a host's rules.md to add to, replace or remove part of a shipped rule or skill. Overrides
  • Taboo — a command Hostwarden never runs without your explicit request, such as writing a partition table or touching a running sshd's configuration. Hard guardrails
  • Taboo guard — the Claude Code hook that blocks the taboos in every permission mode. Hard guardrails
  • SSH safety net — the automatic undo a firewall or network change arms first; it reverts the change unless a new SSH login succeeds. What it asks first
  • Canary — on a change to several hosts, the one host that runs it alone first; the others follow only when its result matches what was expected. One task on many hosts
  • Radius — the hosts a disruptive step reaches beyond its own: its guests, the hosts behind it, the hosts using its services, its cluster peers. What a reboot would hit
  • Maintenance window — a planned time for a disruptive step, with who to notify by when. Planning a maintenance window
  • Coordinator — a background session per operations checkout that keeps track of which session works on which host and passes announced steps on. It never reaches a server. Parallel sessions