Installation

Chancery ships as an npm package with two binaries: kb (the CLI) and kb-mcp (a local MCP facade).

Requirements

• Node 22 or 24 (the supported LTS lines — kb refuses older runtimes with a clear message)
• git (the corpus is a git repository; several safety rails use it)

Install

$ npm install -g @amiable-dev/chancery
$ kb --help

The package is published with npm provenance — verify it with npm audit signatures. The tarball contains the engine and its default ontology only: no corpus content, no operational state, ever.

Initialise a repository

In an empty directory (or a fresh subdirectory of an existing project):

$ mkdir knowledge && cd knowledge
$ kb init
$ kb verify

kb init lays down the default ontology (.kb/ — config, schemas, the promotion rubric with its exemplars, harness skills for Claude Code / Copilot / Windsurf / Devin), the empty collections (concepts/, staging/, flashcards/), and a first index. kb verify is green from the first minute — zero errors, zero warnings.

The installed kb governs the repository it runs in: it walks up from your working directory to the nearest .kb/kb.config.yaml. You can run it from any subdirectory.

Commit .kb/ with the repo

The ontology is part of your canon — schemas, rubric, and facet axes are versioned with the content they govern.

In CI

- run: npm install -g @amiable-dev/chancery
- run: kb verify --format json

The gate is hermetic — no network, no API keys, no model calls — so it runs anywhere Node runs, and its exit code is the contract.