sysknife-cli
Your sysadmin co-pilot. Plan. Approve. Audit.
sysknife-cli installs the sysknife binary — an approval-gated AI system
administration CLI and MCP server. The AI never runs a shell command: it emits
typed actions with formal risk levels, a privileged daemon executes only
what you approve, and every action is written to a tamper-evident,
Ed25519-signed hash-chain audit trail with automatic rollback on atomic hosts.
Part of SysKnife, the MIT reference implementation of the LACS (Linux Agent Control Standard) protocol.
Install
This crate is half of SysKnife. It installs the sysknife binary: the CLI,
the planner, and the stdio MCP server. Executing anything also needs
sysknife-daemon, a privileged systemd service, because the CLI never performs
privileged work itself. Planning and --dry-run work without it.
From source
A C compiler and linker are required (the TLS and SQLite dependencies build
native code). On a machine with only rustup, the build fails at
error: linker cc not found.
Expect 7 to 12 minutes: it compiles around 400 crates. Measured on stock Ubuntu
containers, 6m56s on 24.04 and 11m43s on 22.04. cmake is not required.
Prebuilt, and the daemon too
Faster, and it installs both halves plus your MCP client config:
The wizard downloads SHA-256-verified binaries from the release page, so there
is no compile and no toolchain. On Ubuntu 22.04 note that apt install nodejs
gives Node 12, which is too old.
Use
# Standalone CLI (plan → approve → execute):
# Stdio MCP server, for Claude Code / Cursor / Codex CLI:
npx sysknife-setup wires the MCP server into your AI IDE and installs the
privileged daemon for you. The server exposes sysknife_plan,
sysknife_execute, sysknife_history, sysknife_doctor, and
sysknife_audit_verify as MCP tools.
Links
- Documentation: https://lacs-project.github.io/sysknife/
- Repository: https://github.com/lacs-project/sysknife
- License: MIT
mcp-name: io.github.lacs-project/sysknife