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Curator

Curator: agent environment manager (AEM). Declarative, reproducible, security-gated management of AI agent skills, commands, and environments.

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Curator

Curator is an agent environment manager (AEM): a single tool that manages what an AI coding agent gets in a project. Skills and their transitive dependencies, executable commands, MCP server requirements, per-agent delivery, and the security gates around all of it. Declarative, reproducible, verifiable.

Curator is implemented in Go and follows the Curator Specification, an open protocol for skill packages, project manifests, installation semantics, and the audit registry; sections are cited across this repository as Spec §N.M.

Status

v0.1 development complete: all twelve phases of docs/implementation-plan.md are done. CI consumes the authoritative schemas and conformance vectors from curator-spec on ubuntu, macos, and windows, plus lint and the naming gate. Work is tracked on the in-repo task board under .task-board/.

Install

# Homebrew (macOS, Linux)
brew install relux-works/tap/curator

# installer script (macOS, Linux)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/relux-works/curator/main/install.sh | sh

# Scoop (Windows)
scoop bucket add relux-works https://github.com/relux-works/scoop-bucket
scoop install curator

# Go toolchain
go install github.com/relux-works/curator/cmd/curator@latest

Debian and RPM packages ship with every release, together with SBOMs and cosign signatures. macOS binaries are Developer ID signed (Relux Works, LLC). Verify any downloaded artifact:

gh attestation verify <artifact> --owner relux-works

What Curator manages

  • Skill packages: SKILL.md plus context directories, with an implementation-neutral machine manifest (agent-skill.json, schemas 1 through 5) declaring commands, runtime layout, capabilities, and dependencies. The legacy csk-skill.json filename remains readable.
  • Project manifests: Skillfile.json with exact git references; non-committed development substitutions.
  • Resolution: transitive dependency closures unified to one commit and one source identity per name, with activation modes.
  • Installation: context and runtime separation, install markers with content hashes, a commit-keyed runtime store, command shims, managed per-agent adapters.
  • Scopes: project, global, and hybrid (machine-stored, per-project activation).
  • MCP requirements: read-only verification of declared MCP servers against agent configuration surfaces.
  • Security: source allowlists, declared capabilities, no code execution at install time, and an audit registry client (Ed25519 signed records, deny-wins federation, snapshot verification).

Registry client guarantees

Curator binds persisted rollback and equivocation state to the canonical registry URL, so signing-key rotation never resets the highest accepted snapshot. This durable state lives under the Curator home state/registry directory, outside the disposable cache/registry responses; upgrades migrate legacy state without lowering it, and corruption or write failure is fail-closed. A protected catalog distinguishes first use from deletion of a previously accepted registry state. Record pagination rejects repeated or oversized cursors, more than 10,000 records per artifact query, and responses larger than 16 MiB.

Registry requests use bounded per-attempt and total deadlines. GET requests retry network failures, 429, and 503 at most twice after the first attempt. Publication retries the exact body only with its deterministic Idempotency-Key; other client errors and unsafe requests are never retried. Redirects are rejected so a registry cannot move a request or bearer token to another endpoint.

Commands without profile setup

Shell profile changes are not required. After curator install, agents can invoke project commands through .agents/bin/<command> on Unix and .agents\bin\<command>.cmd on Windows. Global installation publishes non-destructive forwarding shims to a safe user directory already on PATH when one is available; otherwise Curator reports the canonical global bin location. Installed launchers carry the project command directory and resolved system dependency directories themselves, preserve the inherited PATH, and return the child command status.

Repository bootstrap can remain idempotent and non-interactive:

curator bootstrap --if-missing --non-interactive --skills-root "$HOME/src/skills"
curator upgrade .

upgrade fetches only the selected project’s direct and transitive dependency closure. upgrade --dry-run plans with temporary sources and snapshots without changing source checkouts, caches, security state, runtime state, or project artifacts.

Interactive users who want bare command names and automatic project switching can cache the optional hook once:

curator shell-init --install
# Add the source command printed above to .zshrc or .bashrc.

Automatic detection selects zsh or bash from SHELL, preserves Git Bash on Windows, and otherwise selects PowerShell on Windows. The cached hook does not start Curator during later shell launches. Curator never edits a profile automatically. Set CURATOR_AUTO_ENV=0 to retain global activation while disabling project-directory scans.

Development

The repository uses an in-repo task board (.task-board/, epics, stories, and tasks as files) and the agent tooling connected under agents/. Go testing follows the closed-loop tooling of skill-go-testing-tools (including tuitestkit for terminal UI phases).

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the working agreements: board-first workflow, discrete signed commits, spec-first rule.

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

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