Metatron

Prerequisites

• Git (installed on your system, to analyze repository commit history and parse files)
• An Anthropic API key — only for the LLM extraction steps (ingest, triage, refine-feedback). serve, ui, and candidates are fully local and need no key.

Note: The installer automatically downloads and manages uv and Python 3.12+ in an isolated user directory, so you do not need to pre-install them.

Installation

To install metatron as a global tool on your PATH:

curl -sSf https://getmetatron.com/install.sh | sh

Manual Installation & Development

To run it locally from source or contribute to the project:

git clone https://github.com/kerbelp/metatron.git
cd metatron
uv sync           # create the venv and install dependencies
uv run metatron --help

To install from your local clone as a global tool:

uv tool install .

Quick start

metatron ingest /path/to/your/repo      # 1. bootstrap candidates (needs API key)
metatron candidates list                # 2. review …
metatron candidates approve <id>        #    … and curate
metatron serve --repo <id>              # 3. serve canonical priors over MCP

ingest prints the <id> to use for serve. To wire it into a coding agent automatically, see Connecting a coding agent.

Configuration

Secrets come from the environment only. The CLI auto-loads a .env from the working directory (it never overrides an already-exported variable, and .env is gitignored):

```bash

.env in the repo root

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

…or `export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...` directly.

**Non-secret settings** live in an optional `metatron.toml` (environment variables
`METATRON_DB` / `METATRON_MODEL` override it):

Manual MCP client config

If you wire the server up yourself instead of using the script:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "metatron": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--project", "/abs/path/to/metatron", "metatron", "serve", "--repo", "github.com/acme/app"],
      "env": { "METATRON_DB": "/abs/path/to/metatron.db" }
    }
  }
}

Command reference

$ metatron --help
usage: metatron [-h] {ingest,serve,repo,ui,triage,refine-feedback,candidates} ...

positional arguments:
  {ingest,serve,repo,ui,triage,refine-feedback,candidates}
    ingest              bootstrap candidate priors from a repo
    serve               serve one repo's priors to agents over MCP
    repo                inspect the repos in the store
    ui                  launch the local curation web UI
    triage              run the advisory judge over candidate priors (does not auto-curate)
    refine-feedback     reshape captured agent feedback into structured candidate priors (Opus)
    candidates          review and curate candidate priors

Metatron vs. Code Graphs & RAG