Product overview

What exist.io is, who it is for, and the principles guiding its design.

A forge you can operate yourself

exist.io is for engineering teams and agent developers who want a Git forge they can run on their own infrastructure. It unifies Git repository hosting, pull request collaboration, access policies, enterprise federation, and coding agent integrations into one cohesive system without requiring an account with a proprietary vendor.

The product provides a modern, open-source alternative to Origin. It focuses on the forge itself—repositories, collaboration, permissions, policy enforcement, and the interfaces agents use to read and modify code.

Who it is for

• Engineering teams: Organizations that require full ownership over where source code, credentials, and pull request histories are stored.
• Agent developers & automation engineers: Builders creating autonomous coding agents who need structured, permission-aware access to repositories via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Security-conscious enterprises: Teams needing to enforce strict branch rulesets, signed commits, corporate CIDR allowlists, SSH Certificate Authorities, and audit trails without depending on external clouds.

Product principles

Self-hosted by default

The core forge operates entirely on your own hardware or cloud instance without external service dependencies. It uses pure Go (go-git/v6 and SQLite with WAL mode enabled), compiling to a single static binary with zero cgo requirements.

Dual Git transports

Standard Git clients can clone, fetch, and push over both Smart-HTTP and native SSH on port 2222. The embedded SSH server requires zero external host daemons and supports both user public keys and enterprise SSH Certificate Authorities.

Git LFS & Content-Addressable Storage

Large model weights, datasets, and design binaries are handled by an RFC-compliant Git LFS v1 Batch engine with SHA-256 CAS persistence and binary file locking.

Agents act through permissions

Autonomous agents interact with exist.io through the open Model Context Protocol (MCP). Every tool call (repo_tree, diff_compare, pull_request_create, thread_comment) respects the exact same namespace, repository, and branch rulesets as human engineers. Untrusted agents can be restricted to /mcp/readonly to prevent unauthorized mutations.

Safe policy gating

Merge decisions are protected by a native 3-way merge engine and ruleset evaluator. Pull requests can require passing check runs, approved review threads, cryptographically signed commits, and restricted bypass permissions before merging.

What is included vs external