Hoistline

Hoistline gives an MCP client, such as Claude on claude.ai or a Claude Code cloud session, one authenticated MCP endpoint that reaches your own machines. You run the hub (a small server in Docker) behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, and an agent on each machine. Agents connect out to the hub, so your machines open no inbound ports.

Status: v0.1, not yet used in production.

Two modes

• Task mode. delegate_task hands a whole job to a machine: "run Codex on repo X, branch Y, with this prompt", or "build this branch and run the tests on Windows". The agent checks its policy, works in a fresh git worktree, runs the chosen runner (Muse, Codex, Cursor, Grok, or a build-and-test command) and pushes the result to the branch hoistline/<job-id> on GitHub. task_status, task_result and cancel_task follow the job. See docs/runners.md.
• Direct mode. The agent proxies the stdio MCP servers you list on the machine. The hub offers their tools as <machine>__<server>__<tool> (your own machines), and through list_tools and call_tool. See docs/direct-mode.md.

list_machines shows the machines you can use: your own and those shared with you.

Architecture in brief

MCP client ──HTTPS──> Cloudflare Tunnel ──> hub (Docker, SQLite) <──WebSocket── agent (your machine) ──> runners, git, MCP servers

• Hub (packages/hub): Streamable HTTP MCP at /mcp, its own OAuth 2.1 server for MCP clients, login through GitHub (default) or a generic OIDC provider, a web UI at /ui, and SQLite on a mounted volume. It stores no passwords. It signs every job.
• Agent (packages/agent): one executable per OS (hoistline-agent), no Node needed. It pairs with the hub once using a one-time code, then connects with its own key. It verifies each job's signature and enforces the owner's policy locally. The hub cannot override the policy.
• Protocol (packages/protocol): the messages between hub and agent, and job signing.

Docs

• Quickstart: deploy the hub, connect claude.ai, pair a machine, run a first task.
• Permissions: trusted and restricted mode, approvals, sharing, and residual risks. Read it before you pair a machine.
• Cloudflare Tunnel and TrueNAS.
• Other MCP clients: personal access tokens.
• Runners and direct mode.
• Connector checks: the hub's OAuth endpoints, and claude.ai checks still pending.

Building from source

Node 22 and pnpm 9:

pnpm install
pnpm build && pnpm lint && pnpm test
docker build -t hoistline-hub .          # the hub image
scripts/build-agent.sh                   # agent executables in dist-bin/ (needs bun)
scripts/smoke-docker.sh                  # builds the image, starts it with compose, checks it, cleans up

Releases: pushing a v* tag runs .github/workflows/release.yml, which publishes the image ghcr.io/ajthom90/hoistline-hub (amd64 and arm64) and a GitHub release with the four agent executables and SHA256SUMS.

Follow-ups

• Put the requester's login in the signed job, so the agent's approvals show can show it (today it shows the user id; the hub's /ui/jobs shows the login).
• notifications/tools/list_changed: the /mcp endpoint is stateless and cannot send it, so new direct-mode tools appear only when the client lists tools again.
• The manual claude.ai connector checks marked PENDING in docs/spike-connector.md.
• A first real run of the Cursor and Grok runners (their invocations come from the CLIs' help text only).
• Sandboxing runners. Today an allowed runner runs with the owner's full privileges.
• The release workflow has not run yet, and the agent executables were only checked on macOS arm64.

License

Apache-2.0.