Farmer

Farmer sits between your AI coding agent and your terminal, giving you a visual dashboard to approve, deny, or respond to tool calls in real time. Desktop and mobile.

Install

npm install -g @grainulation/farmer

Quick start

# 1. Install hooks (once)
farmer connect --global   # all projects, or:
farmer connect            # current project only

# 2. Start the dashboard
farmer start

# 3. Open the token URL printed to the terminal

# 4. Start claude in any project -- hooks route automatically

Features

• Desktop + mobile dashboard -- session sidebar, permission cards with syntax-highlighted code, activity feed, mobile swipe card view
• Agent-agnostic hook protocol -- Claude Code adapter ships first; write your own for other agents
• Multi-session -- manage multiple AI sessions from one dashboard
• Multi-user roles -- admin and viewer tokens with separate permissions; viewers see read-only cards with "Waiting for admin" labels, admin controls hidden
• Trust tiers -- paranoid (approve everything, overrides session-level rules), standard (auto-approve reads), autonomous (auto-approve most)
• AskUserQuestion -- deny-to-respond pattern lets you answer agent questions from the dashboard
• Security -- three-token auth (admin + viewer + hook), HMAC-signed invite links with expiry, CSRF protection, CSP headers, opportunistic Bearer auth on /hooks/* (see below), audit logging
• Data persistence -- activity and messages survive server restarts
• Stale server guard -- auto-approves when no dashboard is connected (prevents CLI blocking)

CLI

farmer start [--port 9090] [--token <secret>] [--viewer-token <secret>] [--trust-proxy] [--data-dir <path>]
farmer stop
farmer status

Tokens are persisted in a JSON token file (.farmer-token in the data directory). The file stores three tokens:

• admin -- full dashboard access
• viewer -- read-only dashboard access
• hook -- narrow-scope token for /hooks/* Bearer auth; never grants dashboard access

The file is generated automatically on first startup (mode 0600) and is backwards compatible with the legacy plain-text format. When upgrading from a pre-bs-19 farmer, a fresh hook token is generated and appended on first boot.

Hook protocol

Farmer exposes the following hook endpoints. All accept POST with JSON body, localhost only:

Hook authentication (opportunistic Bearer)

On a shared host (Citrix / multi-user Linux), anything on 127.0.0.1 is reachable by other local users. Without auth, any local process could forge sprint-status POSTs and pollute another user's dashboard. Farmer uses an opportunistic Bearer auth scheme to fix this without breaking pre-upgrade users:

• If .farmer-token contains a hook field at server start, every /hooks/* POST MUST include Authorization: Bearer <hookToken>. Missing or wrong token => 401 {"error":"unauthorized"}.
• If the hook field is absent (pre-bs-19 file format), farmer logs a one-time stderr warning (hook auth disabled — create .farmer-token to enable ...) and accepts loopback POSTs for backward compat.
• The admin/viewer tokens are intentionally NOT accepted here; a leaked admin token cannot be used to spam /hooks/*, and a leaked hook token cannot log into the dashboard.

Local hook scripts (e.g. grainulator's sprint-status-notifier.cjs) read the hook token from the farmer data dir (FARMER_DATA_DIR env var or ~/.farmer) and attach the Bearer header automatically. Override with the FARMER_TOKEN env var for tests or CI.

Writing an adapter

To support a new AI agent, extend BaseAdapter in lib/adapters/base.js:

import { BaseAdapter } from "@grainulation/farmer/lib/adapters/base.js";

class MyAgentAdapter extends BaseAdapter {
  get name() {
    return "My Agent";
  }
  parseRequest(body) {
    /* ... */
  }
  formatResponse(decision, context) {
    /* ... */
  }
  getToolName(body) {
    /* ... */
  }
  isQuestion(body) {
    /* ... */
  }
  parseNotification(body) {
    /* ... */
  }
}

Architecture

bin/farmer.js          CLI entry point (start/stop/status)
lib/server.js          Core HTTP + SSE server
lib/adapters/          Agent adapter interface + Claude Code adapter
lib/persistence.js     State persistence (atomic write, debounced)
lib/connect.js         One-step hook installation and settings.json management
lib/security.js        Token auth, CSRF, CSP, PID lock, audit log
public/index.html      Dashboard (inline JS, no build step)

Zero third-party dependencies

Farmer has zero third-party runtime dependencies — depends only on @grainulation/barn (internal ecosystem utilities). SSE for real-time streaming, polling as fallback. Everything else is Node built-ins.

Part of the grainulation ecosystem

Releases

See CHANGELOG.md for release history.

License

MIT