okfctl

Markdown knowledge bases don't rot because people stop writing. They rot because nothing keeps the structure honest—links break on a rename, the index drifts from the tree, provenance goes stale, and no one notices until the corpus is already a maze.

okfctl is the tool that keeps it honest. It authors and maintains Open Knowledge Format (OKF) bundles—a curated tree of Markdown "nodes" with a link graph, reserved index.md/log.md files, and frontmatter provenance—and it checks the whole thing against the spec so drift surfaces as a finding instead of a surprise.

Website: okfctl.dev  •  Docs: docs/  •  Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md  •  Security: SECURITY.md  •  Conduct: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

What it does

Use okfctl to scaffold a bundle, add and move nodes without breaking links, keep the reserved index and change log current, check a corpus against the spec, and inspect its health and link graph. It's a single static Go binary, so it runs anywhere without a toolchain, an interpreter, or a model download.

60-second quickstart

Starting from an empty directory, scaffold a bundle, add a node, build the index, and validate—a full cold start:

okfctl bundle init mykb                                              # scaffold a conformant bundle
okfctl node new concepts/tannin.md --type Reference --title "Tannin" --bundle mykb
okfctl node list --bundle mykb                                       # see the node you just made
okfctl index build mykb                                              # generate the reserved index.md files
okfctl index check mykb                                              # confirm the index is current
okfctl log append mykb --message "added tannin node"                # record the change
okfctl validate mykb                                                 # check against the OKF spec floor
okfctl bundle info mykb                                              # nodes: 1, reserved: 3, okf_version: 0.2

From here, okfctl search "tannin" mykb finds nodes lexically, okfctl graph export mykb dumps the link graph, and okfctl analyze mykb reports where the bundle is weak. Every command explains itself with okfctl <cmd> --help, including a runnable example.

Install

Three ways to get running. Pick one:

Homebrew (macOS, or Linux with Homebrew):

brew install cwest/tap/okfctl

One-liner (macOS and Linux)—detects your OS/arch, downloads the matching release archive, verifies its checksum, and installs okfctl and okfctl-search onto your PATH:

curl -sSL https://okfctl.dev/install.sh | sh

Go toolchain—install from source:

go install github.com/cwest/okfctl@latest

Prebuilt archives, Debian/RPM packages, cosign signature verification, and building from source all live in the install guide.

The spec is the authority

OKF is a specification okfctl consumes; it doesn't author it. The Open Knowledge Format spec decides behavior, and where it does, it wins. okfctl enforces the spec floor for everyone and keeps anything stricter behind an explicit opt-in overlay (--templates, §9.4), so an unknown type or a future frontmatter key still passes validate.

Commands

Grouped by what you're doing. Run okfctl <cmd> --help for full detail and a runnable example, or read the command reference.

Author—build and edit a bundle:

• bundle—scaffold (init) and summarize (info) a bundle.
• node—author and inspect nodes (new, show, list, edit, mv, rm, refresh, promote).
• index—regenerate (build) and verify (check) the reserved index.md.
• log—append (append) and print (show) the reserved log.md history.

Check—hold the corpus to the spec and to curation health:

• validate—check a bundle against the OKF spec floor; optionally overlay type-templates.
• lint—report curation findings (orphans, broken links, coverage gaps); --strict for CI.
• eval—measure node trustworthiness (TACA): a deterministic transparency gate plus an accuracy/alignment/calibration sampler.

Explore—read the structure you've built:

• analyze—report where a bundle is weak: freshness, clusters, gaps, connectivity, structure.
• search—lexical and graph-neighborhood search (stdlib-only, no model or index).
• graph—export the concept-node link graph (--format json|dot).
• serve—serve an interactive web visualization of the bundle graph.

Extend—templates, migration, remotes, and the rest:

• template—list (list) and show (show) the type-templates a bundle declares.
• migrate—upgrade a bundle from OKF v0.1 to v0.2 (two-phase, consumer-agnostic).
• registry—manage named remote bundle sources: git remote for OKF bundles.
• connect—clone or fast-forward a remote bundle source into a local directory.
• plugin—discover (list) and install (install) okfctl-<name> plugins on PATH.
• config—get, set, and list okfctl configuration.
• completion—generate a shell completion script (bash, zsh, fish).
• version—print the okfctl version (also okfctl --version).

Semantic search over a bundle ships as the bundled okfctl-search plugin, invoked as okfctl-search --semantic "query". See the search guide.

Use as an agent plugin

This repo is an Agent Plugins 1.0.0 package: the root plugin.json bundles the four generic okfctl skills (okf-authoring, okf-curation-health, okf-migrate-plan, okf-semantic-search) as an installable unit for compatible agent clients (Copilot, Cursor, Codex, …). Clients that read repo instructions directly pick the same guidance up from AGENTS.md.

Not to be confused with okfctl plugin above—that command discovers and installs okfctl-<name> executable plugins (like okfctl-search) on your PATH. This section is about packaging okfctl's skills for an agent client, which is a different spec.

Prerequisite—install okfctl first. The skills shell out to the okfctl binary, and a plugin client doesn't bundle it. Install it onto your PATH before enabling the plugin (see Install):

brew install cwest/tap/okfctl

The manifest carries no hand-maintained version string: the authoritative version is the release tag, reported by okfctl version.

Learn more

• User docs—concepts, task-oriented guides, and the full command reference live under docs/. Start with concepts, then the guides:
  • Starting and authoring a bundle
  • Keeping index.md current and fixing freshness drift—covers .okf-drift-ignore-revs.
  • Curation health: lint, analyze, and --strict in CI—covers the semantic-lint checks and the vendored/derived skip policy.
  • Search: core lexical/graph and the okfctl-search semantic plugin—covers model2vec setup.
  • Migrating a v0.1 bundle to v0.2
  • Remote sources: registry and connect
  • Extending okfctl with plugins
• Per-command help—okfctl <cmd> --help is authoritative and always matches the binary.
• The spec—the authoritative OKF v0.2 specification.
• For contributors—docs/PRD.md, the ADRs, and the dated plans/specs that record how and why the tool was built.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.