Getting Started: Outpost for Engineers

Outpost is your personal operations center. It syncs email and calendar, builds a knowledge graph, drafts responses, and prepares meeting briefings — all running as scheduled AI tasks in the background.

Prerequisites

• macOS — required. Outpost syncs from Apple Mail and Apple Calendar, and a transitive dependency (@forwardimpact/libmacos) declares "os": ["darwin"]. npm install fails on Linux and Windows with EBADPLATFORM. A cross-platform degraded install (without Apple sync) is on the roadmap; until it ships, install on a Mac.
• Mail and calendar accounts — Outpost reads through Mail.app and Calendar.app. Any account synced inside those apps is walked, including an IMAP'd Gmail account in Mail.app and a CalDAV-synced Google Calendar in Calendar.app. Mail or calendar that lives only outside those apps (the Gmail web app, a separate Outlook client) is not picked up.
• Node.js 22+
• npm
• Claude Code installed via Homebrew (brew install claude) — Outpost spawns claude as a subprocess and the Homebrew install supports NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS for enterprise CA certificates

If your network requires a custom CA bundle, add an env block to ~/.fit/outpost/scheduler.json:

{
  "env": {
    "NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS": "~/.config/ssl/ca-bundle.pem"
  }
}

Install

On macOS:

npm install @forwardimpact/outpost

On Linux or Windows this install fails with EBADPLATFORM citing @forwardimpact/libmacos. That dependency is hard today; nothing in the package degrades cleanly off-Apple yet. Switch to a Mac to continue.

Initialize a knowledge base

npx fit-outpost init

This provisions the default Team knowledge base at ~/.local/share/fit/outpost/Team. Pass a name (for example, npx fit-outpost init personal) to provision a second one beside it.

Check status

npx fit-outpost status

Run the scheduler

npx fit-outpost daemon

Outpost runs as a macOS status menu app with scheduled AI tasks handling background work. The CLI scheduler works on any platform.

macOS Privacy & Security

Outpost needs access to the live Mail and Calendar stores it reads. Grant every permission to a single app, fit-outpost.app, and the whole scheduler and the agents it runs are covered. You never grant access to node, claude, or any other helper process.

Outpost runs two kinds of agent, and they need different access:

• full agents sync the live Mail and Calendar stores or send mail. They read those stores and drive Mail under the one fit-outpost.app grant.
• restricted agents only process already-synced content and your knowledge base, which lives outside every protected folder (~/.local/share/fit/outpost/). They need no macOS grant — even if compromised, a restricted agent cannot reach protected files.

When macOS prompts for the Mail and Calendar stores, grant Full Disk Access to fit-outpost.app. If a draft-side skill sends mail, macOS also prompts once under Automation to let fit-outpost.app control Mail — click Allow. Your knowledge base needs no grant.

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