halofy README

The project's README from github.com/halofyai/halofy. As one markdown file: README.md.

Halofy

The open access and governance layer for AI agents across your organization.
Give every agent the right organizational context through one identity and policy model, with provenance, audit, and signed erasure.

Get started Architecture Build a driver Discussions

CI AGPL-3.0-or-later Node 22 Offline ready No telemetry

As AI spreads across an organization, every agent needs access to shared context without becoming its own identity system, policy engine, or audit silo. Halofy sits between organizational knowledge and the agents that use it. It resolves identity, enforces access, governs change, records every outcome, and makes erasure independently verifiable.

Underneath that governance boundary, Halofy maintains durable context and keeps retrieval replaceable. The result is infrastructure you can inspect, self-host, run offline, and connect to any agent over MCP or HTTP.

Why Halofy

Organization-wide access Governed context Open infrastructure
Agents, applications, and operators use the same server-resolved identity, namespace ACL, roles, and policy boundary over MCP or HTTP. Every change follows one auditable path with provenance, supersedence, append-only history, and signed erasure. Postgres remains the authority while retrieval engines plug in through an ACL-scoped, read-only driver interface.

What ships in this repository

Quickstart

Run the complete offline story

git clone https://github.com/halofyai/halofy.git
cd halofy/kernel
npm ci
npm run demo

No API key. No database server. No model download. No network call. The demo boots the real kernel on embedded PGlite, then exercises pinning, assembly, writes, hybrid search, an L3 context fault, audit, import, fragmentation, and signed erasure.

== T0 ·· boot in-memory, pin the refund policy, assemble the working set
booted: embedder=hash(dim=256) llm=stub

== T3 ·· mem_fault - page missing context in from L3
fault: hit=true source=L3 injected=2

== T7 ·· mem.forget - erase the customer and mint a signed certificate
certificate 01... verifyCertificate === true
after forget: mem_search surfaces 0 matching facts

demo complete - kernel closed.

Then prove the kernel and its retrieval boundary:

npm test
npx tsx src/cli.ts conformance baseline

The current standalone verification passes 2,678 tests across 205 files and all 6/6 driver-conformance checks. Timings and generated identifiers vary by machine; the behavior does not.

Start the API and control room

cd kernel
npm run serve

Open http://localhost:8787/console/login. For a durable self-hosted deployment with Postgres, generated keys, and Docker Compose, follow the self-hosting guide.

Connect an agent over MCP

cd kernel
npx tsx src/cli.ts keygen org/support/agent-1 user:dana owner
HALOMEM_API_KEY=hm_... npm run mcp

The API key resolves the namespace, actor, and role server-side. MCP tool schemas do not accept caller-asserted identity fields.

Architecture

The important boundaries

  1. Identity is server-owned. Namespace, actor, role, and source scope come from the credential, never from a request body.
  2. Access is organization-wide and policy-bound. The same ACL and role decisions apply across agents, applications, operators, MCP, and HTTP.
  3. Changes are governed. Corrections close the prior fact's validity interval and link the replacement. They do not overwrite history.
  4. Reads are delegated. A retriever sees only an ACL-scoped ScopedView and can return references only. It cannot write or reach audit/storage modules.
  5. Postgres is the authority. Context, embeddings, policy, provenance, tombstones, and audit live together. PGlite embeds the same model for local development and tests.
  6. Every outcome audits. Success, denial, miss, brownout, and error paths all append an event.

Read the architecture guide for the syscall pipeline, ACL examples, SQL, tiering, brownout behavior, and a per-directory source map.

Security model

The core namespace rule is deliberately small: a caller in namespace N sees rows belonging to N or an exact /-split ancestor of N. Siblings and descendants remain invisible unless an explicit, audited administration path allows a subtree operation.

caller: org/support/agent-1

org                          visible     ancestor
org/support                  visible     ancestor
org/support/agent-1          visible     self
org/support/agent-2          hidden      sibling
org/support/agent-1/scratch  hidden      descendant
org/sales                    hidden      sibling

The query layer enforces this rule with exact ancestor matching. Retrieval drivers do not reimplement it; they receive an already-scoped view. See the threat model for the known partial controls and adversarial cases, and the architecture guide for the worked ACL queries.

Open by design

The standalone build is not a trial:

Property Standalone behavior
Licence/activation No licence key, edition flag, activation, or entitlement check
Packaging quota None; the public QuotaPort defaults to UNMETERED
Capacity controls Operator-owned policy rate limits and model-budget brownout only
Telemetry None; no usage beacon or Halofy phone-home
Models Offline deterministic defaults; optional direct Anthropic, OpenAI-compatible, OpenAI embedding, and Azure OpenAI configuration
Database Embedded PGlite by default; regular Postgres/pgvector for durable deployments
Export Open schema, export, manifest, and erasure paths

The permanent boundary is documented in OPEN-SOURCE-SCOPE.md. The practical feature matrix is in open build vs. managed service.

Deliberately commercial

Halofy's managed operations, not the access and governance boundary, fund the open kernel:

None of those components is required to run this repository. The connector framework, baseline model plumbing, governed context lifecycle, access control, console, self-host stack, and test suite are present and runnable.

Documentation

Guide Use it when you want to…
Getting started Go from clone to first key, write, search, MCP connection, and real model configuration
Architecture Trace requests, understand custody, or change the kernel
Driver kit Build and validate a retrieval cartridge
Self-hosting Run Postgres, Docker Compose, backups, restores, and upgrades
Threat model Review assets, boundaries, adversaries, and known partial controls
Open-source scope See what stays open and how that promise changes
Kernel reference Find scripts, source directories, environment variables, and development commands

The full index is in docs/README.md.

Contributing

Start with CONTRIBUTING.md. Security-sensitive changes to authentication, tenancy, ACLs, migrations, encryption, audit, erasure, or the write/retrieval boundary require adversarial review and regression coverage.

Security reports belong in the private channels described by SECURITY.md, not in public issues. Community expectations are in CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

License

The kernel and console are AGPL-3.0-or-later. Named client and extension subtrees are Apache-2.0 so they can be embedded without relicensing the host application. These include kernel/src/driver/, kernel/src/mcp/, and kernel/integrations/. See LICENSING.md and NOTICE for the authoritative file-by-file boundary.

The Halofy name is a trademark; neither software licence grants trademark rights. See TRADEMARK.md.

halofy (halofyai/halofy)

pgvector
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319 ·GitHub
Halofy
What is this?Halofy is an access and governance layer that sits between an organization's knowledge and the AI agents that use it, handling identity, policy, provenance, audit, and signed erasure.
Is this a library I import, or a server I run?It is a self-hosted server/kernel exposed over MCP and HTTP, with a frameworkless admin console (the 'control room') for access, teams, sources, policies, and audit.
How do I get it running?Run the offline demo on embedded PGlite (no API key, database server, or network call needed) to see the full kernel flow, then start the API and control room; for a durable deployment follow the self-hosting guide with Postgres and Docker Compose.
Do I need a Postgres database to try it?No — the quickstart defaults to embedded PGlite for zero-setup local development and tests; a real Postgres/pgvector instance is only required for a durable, self-hosted deployment.
What is left out of the open-source build?Model routing and spend attribution, billing, hosted Slack/Discord/WhatsApp/Google Chat apps, the managed SaaS connector catalogue, federated cross-org query, and the tuned extraction prompt pack are part of the paid managed service, not the open kernel.
How does it decide which agents can see which data?Every caller resolves server-side to a namespace, and the access rule only lets it see rows in that namespace or an exact ancestor path; sibling and descendant namespaces stay invisible unless an explicit, audited admin operation opens them.
What connectors does it ship with?Four public connectors are included out of the box: filesystem, Postgres, Obsidian, and manual CSV import, and all of them feed the same governed write path.
How does erasure work here?Erasure is cryptographically signed and independently verifiable rather than a plain delete, and ordinary corrections close the prior fact's validity interval and link the replacement instead of overwriting history.
Has the project actually been tested at this scale?The standalone build currently passes 2,678 tests across 205 files and all 6 of 6 driver-conformance checks, run in a hermetic lane using embedded PGlite, a deterministic stub LLM, and a hash embedder with zero network access.
What are similar projects?bytebase, OpenMetadata, anythingmcp, casdoor, utopia, zilan, OpenLore, OpenBot
Which topics is it in?agent-governance, data-governance, identity-management, pgvector, access-control, multi-tenant, audit-log, multi-agent-systems, rbac, knowledge-management, context-engineering, enterprise
Creator
halofyai
Size
2.7 MB
Stars
319
Updated
CommitAug 24
Age
1mo
Commits · 90 Days