Config file (YAML)

Paddock has always been configured from the environment (every PADDOCK_* variable is listed here). As the number of knobs grew, so did the length of the -e FOO=bar list on the run command. Since v0.31 you can instead keep an instance’s settings in a single YAML file — and every environment variable still wins over it, so you can override one value at run time without rewriting the file.

This page covers the file: where it lives, how it layers with the environment, and a realistic example. It documents the same loader as the env-var page (packages/server/src/config.ts), so the two are two views of one config.

Precedence: file < env, defaults beneath both

There is one resolution order, from lowest to highest priority:

1. Built-in defaults — the floor. Every setting has a sane default baked into the code (e.g. PORT → 4000, auth.mode → none).
2. The YAML file — overrides the defaults. This is the base layer: each file value is threaded in as the fallback beneath the matching environment read.
3. Environment variables — override the file. A PADDOCK_* (or plain, e.g. PORT) env var always wins over the file value it shadows.

So the mental model is defaults < file < env. An env-only deployment is completely unaffected: with no file present, resolution is byte-for-byte the behaviour it had before the loader existed. You can adopt the file gradually — move your stable settings into it and keep using env vars for the one or two you tweak per run.

Same parsing either way

A file value is coerced through the same parsing an env value gets, so all the rules on the environment page — blank-is-unset, the 1/true/yes boolean convention, unknown-enum-falls- back-to-default, path canonicalisation — apply identically to file values. A scalar may be written in its natural YAML type (port: 4000, brand: { name: Homelab }) or as a string; both resolve the same way.

Where the file lives

Paddock looks for the file in one of two places:

• PADDOCK_CONFIG — if this env var is set, it’s an explicit path to the file (wins over the default location).
• Otherwise <PADDOCK_DATA_DIR>/paddock.config.yaml — the default location, under your data directory (which defaults to ./data).

The file is entirely optional:

• No file → no-op. If the default file doesn’t exist, Paddock runs env-only, exactly as before. Existing installs need change nothing.
• A missing explicit file is an error. If PADDOCK_CONFIG points at a path that doesn’t exist, that’s treated as a misconfiguration — startup fails with a clear error rather than silently ignoring your intent.
• A malformed file is an error. Unparseable YAML, or a top-level list/scalar where a mapping is expected, fails startup with a clear message rather than booting with a half-empty config.
• Empty sections are ignored, not fatal. An empty file (or a comments-only one) is treated as “no overrides”. A valueless key (brand: with nothing after it) is dropped, so that section falls back to env/defaults instead of crashing.
• Unknown keys are ignored. This leaves room for the schedule and hook declarations that share this file to be added without breaking older builds.

An example config file

Keys mirror the resolved config: top-level scalars plus a few nested sections. Every value below is optional and overridable by its matching env var. This is the same YAML house style as project.yaml and the generated herdctl.yaml.

# <PADDOCK_DATA_DIR>/paddock.config.yaml
# A home-lab instance. Every value here is overridable by its env var.

# --- Core ---
port: 4000
host: 0.0.0.0
logLevel: info

# --- Agent behaviour ---
keeperDriveMode: session      # session enables cross-turn autonomy (ScheduleWakeup / /loop)
nativeSystemPrompt: true      # use the native Claude Code prompt + CLAUDE.md hierarchy

# Appended to every keeper turn's system prompt. Omit the key entirely for
# Paddock's built-in text; set it to "" to append nothing. See
# /configuration/instance-settings/#the-environment-prompt
environmentPrompt: |
  You are running in Acme's Paddock — replies render as Markdown in a browser.
  Link every ticket as [ABC-123](https://acme.atlassian.net/browse/ABC-123).

# --- What this instance shares with the host's Claude Code (#691) ---
# `own` = Paddock's, isolated inside the data dir. `host` = this machine's
# Claude Code. Omit the block entirely for full isolation, which is the default:
# nothing outside the data dir is written.
claude:
  transcripts: own            # own | host — see the section below
  credentials: host           # own | host — the ONE key that defaults to host
  instructions: own           # own | host — your ~/.claude CLAUDE.md, agents, commands
  hooks: own                  # own | host — shell commands your settings.json binds

# --- Authentication (see the Authentication page for modes) ---
auth:
  mode: jwt
  jwksUrl: https://idp.example.com/application/o/paddock/jwks/
  jwtIssuer: https://idp.example.com/application/o/paddock/

# --- Per-instance branding (tell several instances apart) ---
brand:
  name: Homelab
  logo: "🏠"
  accent: "#3c6ec2"

# --- Capabilities & safety gates (default OFF; maxSpawnDepth defaults to 1) ---
selfMcpEnabled: true          # read-only self-management MCP for Claude
selfMcpWriteEnabled: true     # + the write tools (create/fork/send/archive/fan-out)
selfMcpProjectsEnabled: false # + create_project (provisions a project, clones a repo)
maxSpawnDepth: 1              # how deep spawned children may themselves spawn
scheduleMutationEnabled: false
hooksMcpEnabled: false        # + the trigger tools (list/set/remove/run_trigger)

# --- External Management API (/mcp) — file-first; only trustedProxies has an env var ---
managementApi:
  instanceId: my-paddock                    # binds `pdk_<instanceId>_…` tokens here
  publicUrl: https://paddock.example.com    # required once `clients` is set
  trustedProxies: [172.18.0.0/16]           # whose X-Forwarded-Proto the guard believes
  clients:
    my-laptop:
      auth:
        ref: env:PADDOCK_MCP_TOKEN_MY_LAPTOP  # env reference ONLY — inline is an error
      # omit `scope` for the read-only default

# --- Inbound composer attachments (file/image upload; all optional) ---
attachments:
  enabled: true                 # master switch (default on)
  maxFileSizeMb: 25             # per-file cap
  maxFilesPerMessage: 10        # per-message cap
  allowedTypes: ["*"]           # a real array here (env is comma-separated)

# --- Voice dictation (Whisper), git author, GitHub OAuth ---
transcription:
  mode: remote
  endpoint: https://whisper.example.com/v1
gitAuthor:
  name: Paddock
  email: paddock@localhost

Point Paddock at a file in a non-default place with PADDOCK_CONFIG:

PADDOCK_CONFIG=/etc/paddock/instance.yaml node packages/server/dist/index.js

claude — what this instance shares with your Claude Code

Paddock drives Claude Code, which means it sits next to state you already have: transcripts, a login, MCP servers, a CLAUDE.md. By default it writes none of it, and reads almost none of it. A fresh instance keeps its own Claude home under the data dir; the only thing it takes from your ~/.claude unasked is your login (see credentials below) and the non-executable half of your settings.json. Everything else is a key you turn on.

Each key under claude: answers one question — whose X does this instance use? — with one vocabulary, so the guarantee is readable at a glance rather than inferred from which directory Paddock happens to be pointed at.

claude:
  transcripts: own    # own | host — default own
  credentials: host   # own | host — default host
  instructions: own   # own | host — default own
  hooks: own          # own | host — default own

transcripts

• own (default) — each project’s chats live in its own .chats/, inside the data dir. Move the data dir and the whole instance moves with it. Deleting a chat deletes Paddock’s copy.
• host — Paddock uses your real ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-cwd>/ folder for each project’s working directory. One set of files, both directions: a chat you continue in the terminal with claude --resume shows up in Paddock without a restart or a re-import, and vice versa. Deleting a chat in Paddock releases it — the chat leaves your list and the transcript stays on disk, because it is your history rather than Paddock’s copy (#689).

host is implemented as one symlink per project pointing out of Paddock’s own Claude home, not by pointing Paddock at ~/.claude. That distinction is load-bearing rather than cosmetic: agent memory lives beside the transcripts, and an agent cannot write to any path containing a .claude component — so the home that moves is the one thing that must not (#690). Paddock refuses to start if CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR or a claudeHome: key resolves to your own ~/.claude, and the refusal names this key as what you probably wanted.

credentials

The one key that defaults to host, and the exception is deliberate: isolation is about writes. Reading a login creates, moves and deletes nothing, while defaulting it to own produces an instance that boots cleanly, says everything is ready, and then fails every single turn with “Not logged in” — which is exactly the bug this key closes (#683).

• host (default) — Paddock uses the Claude Code login already on this machine. On macOS that is the Keychain entry claude /login wrote; everywhere else it is your ~/.claude/.credentials.json, symlinked into Paddock’s home rather than copied, so a refreshed token is never duplicated or stale.
• own — Paddock uses only a login of its own: a CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in the environment, or a .credentials.json inside its own Claude home (CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR=<data-dir>/claude-home claude login). Nothing of yours is read. If a previous boot bridged your .credentials.json in, that symlink is removed on the next start.

The macOS half works because Claude Code resolves its secure-storage scope from CLAUDE_SECURESTORAGE_CONFIG_DIR instead of CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR whenever that variable is defined. Paddock defines it as the empty string, which selects the unsuffixed service name — your real login — while its own Claude home stays exactly where it is. Nothing else is shared by this key: not transcripts, not memory, not .claude.json. If you set CLAUDE_SECURESTORAGE_CONFIG_DIR yourself to something non-empty, Paddock honours yours and says so at startup.

Paddock says which login it is running on when it has anything to report, and warns before the first turn — rather than after it — when it can find none.

instructions

Your ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, agents/, commands/ and plugins/ — prompts, subagent definitions and slash commands. Content the model reads, or definitions it can invoke by name; nothing here runs a command on its own.

• own (default) — none of them are loaded. Each project’s own CLAUDE.md and .claude/ are unaffected, and so is anything you put in Paddock’s own Claude home.
• host — all four are symlinked in, which is what every version before 0.62 did unconditionally.

This default is a reversal, and it is smaller than it looks. The version it reverses argued that dropping these is a silent behaviour regression — your curated ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md no longer reaching your agents, with no error. That is a fair argument, but its premise does not hold for the runtime Paddock actually runs chats on: user memory, agents/ and commands/ all move with Claude Code’s user setting source, and Paddock’s agents run with only project loaded (see the caution under hooks). So on a default chat turn these four have been inert since chats moved to the SDK runtime — bridged or not. They do apply to the CLI paths: the post-turn sweeper, triggers, and driveMode: batch chats.

It is the default anyway because “own everywhere means nothing outside the data dir is read or written” has to be a guarantee you can read off this file, and “…except your CLAUDE.md, agents, commands and plugins, always, with no key to turn them off” is not a guarantee, it is a footnote. Paddock names the key at startup when it finds files it is not loading, so the fix is one line and you are told where. Your project’s own CLAUDE.md is unaffected in every mode, and so is agent auto-memory, which lives in the Claude home but is not gated by the setting source.

plugins/ is bridged under host for completeness rather than effect. The runtime’s plugin root really is the Claude home, and it does discover what is there — but discovery is driven by enabledPlugins, which lives in settings.json, and Paddock’s agents run with only the project settings source loaded (see below), so the home’s settings.json is never read and the flag that would switch a bridged plugin on never arrives. Inert today, for a reason that is a property of two callers rather than of the files, so the lever governs them regardless.

hooks

Hooks are shell commands your ~/.claude/settings.json binds to tool use and session lifecycle (PreToolUse, PostToolUse, SessionStart, …). Before 0.62 they were inherited unconditionally, so every hook you had ever configured ran inside every Paddock turn with no key to turn it off. This is that key.

• own (default) — your hooks do not run here.
• host — your settings.json is symlinked in whole and your hooks run.

settings.json is a mixed bag: it carries hooks and permissions, model, statusLine, enabledPlugins. A symlink is all-or-nothing and the file is not, so under own Paddock writes its own settings.json into its Claude home — your keys, with hooks dropped. Two consequences worth knowing:

• A restart is what applies an edit. The generated file is regenerated at every startup, so changing your ~/.claude/settings.json reaches Paddock on the next start rather than immediately. Only files that actually define hooks are copied at all; without them Paddock symlinks yours as before and nothing can go stale.
• A settings.json you put in Paddock’s own Claude home is never touched. Paddock recognises its own generated file by hash, so editing that file makes it yours and Paddock stops regenerating it — and says at startup that hooks: own is therefore not in force for whatever that file says.

If your ~/.claude/settings.json cannot be parsed, Paddock plants nothing rather than falling back to the symlink: it would rather run with no user-level settings than hand over the hooks this key exists to withhold.

Which turns this governs today

<claude-home>/settings.json is Claude Code’s userSettings source, and Paddock’s chat runtime does not load it. herdctl invokes the Agent SDK with --setting-sources=project for any agent that has a working directory — which is every Paddock agent — so a default chat turn reads your project’s .claude/settings.json and never the Claude home’s. The CLI runtime (the post-turn sweeper, triggers, and driveMode: batch chats) passes no such flag and runs on the default user,project,local, so it does read it.

So today the host’s hooks execute in the sweeper, in triggers and in batch chats, and not in a default SDK chat turn — narrower than it looks, and still real code execution. The same asymmetry applies to the keys this key keeps: your permissions and model reach those paths and not the SDK ones, which was true before this key existed too.

Scope, stated plainly: hooks: own means “no host hooks”, not “no host commands”. settings.json has several other keys that name a script to run — apiKeyHelper, awsAuthRefresh, awsCredentialExport, gcpAuthRefresh, proxyAuthHelper, otelHeadersHelper, statusLine, subagentStatusLine — and they are still inherited. Several of those are how a corporate login works, so dropping them under a key named hooks would break authentication for people who did nothing wrong; where they belong is an open question (#691).

Still not split out, and inherited with the Claude home until it is: MCP servers, tracked in #691.

Capability & safety gates worth setting here

Several of the knobs above are capability gates that default to off — a plain instance advertises none of them, and you opt in per instance. They are prime candidates for the config file because they rarely change between runs. Each is settable either in the YAML or via its env var (env wins), and several also take a per-project override that wins at dispatch time.

The first four rows decide which of the fourteen mcp__paddock_manage__* tools Claude is handed; the self-management MCP reference lists every tool, its arguments and the exact gating matrix.

YAML key	Env var	Default	What it gates
selfMcpEnabled	PADDOCK_SELF_MCP	false	Give Claude the read-only self-management MCP (mcp__paddock_manage__*): list_projects, list_chats, read_chat.
selfMcpWriteEnabled	PADDOCK_SELF_MCP_WRITE	false	Add the self-management write tools: create_chat, fork_chat, send_message, archive_chat, unarchive_chat, fork_chat_batch. Only honoured when selfMcpEnabled is also on — write implies read. (The trigger tools are gated separately, by hooksMcpEnabled below.)
selfMcpProjectsEnabled	PADDOCK_SELF_MCP_PROJECTS	false	Add the self-management project tool (create_project) — provisioning a whole new project, cloning a repo when repo-backed. Only honoured when selfMcpWriteEnabled (and so selfMcpEnabled) is also on. Its own flag because it creates instance-level state and clones a caller-supplied URL; when off the tool is absent, not present-but-refusing.
maxSpawnDepth	PADDOCK_MAX_SPAWN_DEPTH	1	How deep a spawned chat may itself spawn: a server-initiated turn at depth d gets the self-MCP only if d ≤ maxSpawnDepth. 0 restores “no spawned child gets it”; valid values are 0–8. A human turn is the depth-0 root and is never depth-gated. A per-project override wins at dispatch.
scheduleMutationEnabled	PADDOCK_SCHEDULE_MUTATION	false	Construct herdctl’s fleet manager with allowScheduleMutation, permitting its runtime schedule add/remove APIs; off (the default) makes them throw. It is not what gates the self-MCP trigger tools (that’s hooksMcpEnabled), and triggers declared in project.yaml are armed regardless.
hooksMcpEnabled	PADDOCK_HOOKS_MCP	false	Advertise the unified trigger-management MCP tools — list_triggers, set_trigger, remove_trigger, run_trigger. (There are no list_hooks/set_hook/remove_hook tools; Epic T collapsed the separate hook and schedule verbs into this one family, and kept this flag as their gate.) Only honoured alongside the self-MCP write tools; a per-project hooksMcpEnabled override wins at dispatch.

managementApi — the file-first block

The external Management API is configured here rather than in the environment, because a list of clients each with its own scope doesn’t express well as a scalar.

The one exception is trustedProxies — a flat list, and the thing a container deployment most often needs to set per-environment. It also reads PADDOCK_MANAGEMENT_TRUSTED_PROXIES, which wins over the file; that is the only PADDOCK_MANAGEMENT_* variable Paddock reads.

trustedProxies names the peers whose X-Forwarded-Proto: https the /mcp plaintext guard believes. The peer is the socket address, so a client can’t forge it — but a client also can’t vouch for its own transport, which is why the list exists (#474, shipped in 0.48.1):

managementApi:
  # Recommended: name your TLS terminator, and only its forwarded scheme is
  # believed. This is what makes the guard a control rather than a footgun-preventer.
  trustedProxies: [172.18.0.5]

  # The DEFAULT, if you omit the key entirely — equivalent to:
  #   trustedProxies: [loopback, linklocal, uniquelocal]
  # Loopback plus the whole private address space. Keeps a TLS-terminating
  # sidecar working, but can't tell your proxy from any other private host, so
  # believing a forwarded scheme under it logs a warning once per peer.
  #
  # Strictest — believe no forwarded scheme at all; reach /mcp over real TLS or
  # over loopback:
  #   trustedProxies: [none]
  #
  # The opposite, `all`, restores the pre-#474 behaviour and boots with a loud
  # warning. Only for a network you fully control.

A comma- or newline-delimited string works in place of the array, and an entry that is not a valid IP, CIDR or preset is dropped with a logged error rather than failing startup — dropping one can only make the guard stricter.

The one thing that never goes in this file is the token itself. This file is git-tracked (and editable from the instance Config screen), so a client’s credential is given as an environment reference — auth: { ref: "env:VAR" } — and an inline token:/secret: is a hard config error, not a warning.

The block fails closed in both directions: /mcp returns 404 until both clients and publicUrl are set, and a client whose referenced variable is unset, blank, or under 24 characters is dropped with a warning rather than weakening the gate. A client with no scope gets read-only — any write scope can start turns, and Claude has Bash. The Management API reference has the full schema, the scope grammar and a worked example.

For the full list of settings — auth headers, Whisper models, recovery knobs, dev-server advertising, and more — see the Environment variables reference; every PADDOCK_* server setting there has a matching YAML key. (The runtime credentials — CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY — and the Vite web-build variables are read straight from the environment and have no file key.)

Per-project overrides layer on top

The YAML file sets instance-wide defaults. A handful of settings can then be overridden per project from that project’s Settings tab (persisted in its project.yaml), which wins at dispatch time — for example driveMode, maxSpawnDepth, hooksMcpEnabled, the chat recovery knobs, and the attachments group (a project can raise/lower its upload caps or disable uploads entirely). So the layering is: built-in default → instance YAML/env → per-project override.

See also

• Environment variables — the canonical list of every setting, with defaults, that this file mirrors.
• Authentication — auth modes and the auth section in detail.
• Chat recovery — the recovery section and its per-project override.