Any agent with OpenLore over SSH

Connect a coding agent, a CI job or a script to a shared knowledge repository with nothing but ssh.

We are going to serve a docs directory, connect to it from a shell, give one agent its own identity, and teach the agent when to use the server.

Before you start, install OpenLore.

1. Serve a directory

Pick any folder of Markdown. We will use ./docs.

openlore ./docs

The server logs SSH on port 2222 and HTTP on port 8080. The contents of ./docs appear at /, so a file at ./docs/public/retry.md is /public/retry.md to an agent.

2. Explore from a shell

Any SSH client works, with or without a key.

ssh -p 2222 localhost "tree -L 2 /"

Commands compose the way they do in a normal shell.

ssh -p 2222 localhost "grep -rl 'retry' / | xargs wc -l"

Run help to see every command the server supports.

ssh -p 2222 localhost help

Note: The shell is a Go interpreter over a virtual filesystem. bash, curl and exec do not exist, so an agent cannot reach the host machine through it.

3. Give the agent an identity

Anonymous sessions use the built-in guest role. To tell agents apart, and to let one of them write later, map its SSH public key to an identity in lore.json.

{
  "allow_keyless": true,
  "unknown_identity": "allow",
  "roles": { "backend": {} },
  "docsets": {
    "public": {
      "paths": ["/public"],
      "access": { "allow": { "guest": "ro", "backend": "ro" } }
    },
    "backend": {
      "paths": ["/backend"],
      "access": { "allow": { "backend": "rw" } }
    }
  },
  "identities": [
    { "name": "backend-agent", "public_key": "ssh-ed25519 AAAA…", "roles": ["backend"] }
  ]
}

Point the server at it in openlore.yml, in the directory you run openlore from, and restart.

auth_file: ./lore.json

Verify

Connect with the agent’s key and check who the server thinks you are.

ssh -p 2222 -i ~/.ssh/backend_agent localhost whoami

The output is backend-agent. Connect without the key and the same command prints guest.

Learn more about identities, roles and docsets.

4. Teach the agent the conventions

Every OpenLore server has an agents command that prints a ready-made instructions section. Append it to the file your agent reads on start.

ssh -p 2222 localhost agents >> AGENTS.md

The section tells the agent when to search the knowledge repository and which commands to use. For an agent on another machine, replace localhost with the server’s hostname.

Next steps

• Let an agent publish into an inbox so it can contribute without editing existing files.
• Connect Claude Code to the same server over MCP.
• Learn how folder rules cap file size and enforce structure per folder.