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. It runs all of these as scheduled AI tasks in the background.

Prerequisites

• macOS — required. Outpost syncs from Apple Mail and Apple Calendar. 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. Outpost walks any account synced inside those apps. That includes a Gmail account synced over IMAP in Mail.app and a Google Calendar synced over CalDAV in Calendar.app. Outpost does not pick up mail or calendar that lives only outside those apps (the Gmail web app, a separate Outlook client).
• Node.js 22+
• npm
• Claude Code installed with Homebrew (brew install claude) — Outpost spawns claude as a subprocess. 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 and cites @forwardimpact/libmacos. That dependency is a hard requirement today. No part of the package degrades cleanly off Apple platforms yet. Switch to a Mac to continue.

Initialize a knowledge base

npx fit-outpost init

The command 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.

The knowledge base root is an Obsidian vault. After init it holds five tier directories, the personal Briefings/ directory, and the bundled files:

~/.local/share/fit/outpost/Team/
├── 0-Draft/          # Tier 0: you only, never shared
├── 1-Management/     # Tier 1: senior managers
├── 2-Confidential/   # Tier 2: managers with hiring duties
├── 3-Team/           # Tier 3: the whole team
├── 4-Public/         # Tier 4: anyone
├── Briefings/        # Personal: daily briefings
├── registry.yaml     # Personal: metadata vocabularies
├── CLAUDE.md         # Personal: agent instructions
└── .claude/          # Personal: agents, skills, settings

The numbered tiers hold the knowledge graph. Each tier is one unit of sharing. A lower tier number means a narrower audience. Every other root entry is personal and never shared. Entity folders such as 3-Team/People/ appear when an agent first writes to them.

Validate the knowledge base

npx fit-outpost validate ~/.local/share/fit/outpost/Team

The command checks tier ranks, link direction and format, and note frontmatter. A fresh knowledge base passes with no findings.

Check status

npx fit-outpost status

Run the scheduler

npx fit-outpost daemon

Outpost runs as a macOS status menu app. Scheduled AI tasks handle the 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. That grant covers the whole scheduler and the agents it runs. 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 a compromised 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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