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 ~/Documents/Personal

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 agents need access to specific folders (Documents, Mail, Calendar). When macOS prompts, grant only the folders each process needs via System Settings > Privacy & Security > Files & Folders:

• Outpost.app — the TCC responsible process (Swift launcher)
• node — runs skill scripts with #!/usr/bin/env node shebangs
• "2.1.72" (or another version number) — this is the Claude Code CLI. macOS shows its version string instead of a name. Safe to grant per-folder access.

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