SourceAnt agent

The process that stays up on a developer's machine. It supervises the SourceAnt indexer, keeps the local code graph current, and serves it to the CLI and the local UI.

It never parses code. The grammars and the graph shape live in the Python core, so that one index serves every client.

What it does

Starts the core on a free port and waits for it to answer. Restarts it when it dies, backing off as failures repeat. Serves its own HTTP surface on 127.0.0.1:8930, where /health reports whether the core is up and how many times it has been started, and /api/repositories and /api/graph read the index.

It also serves the local view at /: Overview, Graph, Knowledge, Reviews, Skills, Repositories, Settings. The assets are embedded in the binary, so the view works with no network and cannot drift from the agent serving it.

The view is Vue, built by Vite from ui/: Tailwind for the design tokens, lucide for icons, force-graph in 2D and 3d-force-graph for Tree, Radial, Layered and Force.

A checkout is reviewed here, by the same reviewer a pull request goes through. It reads the working tree against the branch it would merge into, so a change is read before anybody else sees it. The core does the reading; the agent asks for it and keeps the answer.

/mcp is proxied through to the core, so a coding agent on this machine reaches the same index and can ask for the same review.

Loopback is the default because the agent reads a working tree. The machine it runs on is the only audience it has.

Running it

Building needs Go and npm: make build builds the view, then the binary that embeds it. make build-go skips the view when nothing about it changed, and make ui-dev runs it against an agent already running.

make build
./sourceant-agent

It starts whatever sourceant install put on this machine, reading ~/.sourceant/config.json: a container, or the core as a program. A container binds every interface inside and is published to loopback outside, because one binding the container's own loopback could be reached by nothing.

With nothing installed it looks for sourceant on PATH, which is what somebody working on the core itself already has. See sourceant/cli to install one, and sourceant/sourceant for the core.

Variable	Default	Meaning
SOURCEANT_AGENT_LISTEN	127.0.0.1:8930	Where the agent answers
SOURCEANT_CORE	what was installed	A core to supervise instead, overriding the install
SOURCEANT_CORE_PORT	chosen at start	The port to start the core on

Building

make qa      # fmt-check, vet, lint, test
make build

Licence

MIT.