House Party Protocol — Installing House Party Protocol

You are an agent that has been asked to install House Party Protocol into a repository. This file is the whole instruction. Read it to the end before you run anything: step 4 contains a gate you must not skip, and knowing it exists changes what you do in step 3.

House Party Protocol is a local-first harness for reliability, governance and evaluation of coding agents. It has no runtime dependencies and talks to no network service. Installing it writes files into a repository and wires them to a host; nothing else happens.

Step 0 — identify your host

The two hosts wire differently, and the difference is not cosmetic.

you are	go to
Claude Code	steps 1 → 4, then step 6
Codex CLI	steps 1 → 4, then step 5, then step 6
neither	the CLI still installs and `hpp doctor` still answers, but no host wiring exists for you; stop after step 3 and tell the person

Step 1 — check the preconditions, do not assume them

Python 3.10 or newer. CI exercises 3.10 through 3.13 on Linux, macOS and Windows. Older interpreters are not promised, because nothing measures them.
git on PATH, for attestation.
A target repository. Installing into an empty directory works and is how the wizard is tested, but the harness is only useful where there is work to govern.

If a precondition fails, say which one and stop. Do not install a Python, do not change the person's interpreter, do not work around a missing git.

Step 2 — install the CLI

pip install git+https://github.com/rusharlabs/house-party-protocol@v2.11.4

pipx install git+… works the same way. The package ships its own manifest and benchmark suite, so the CLI answers from any directory once installed.

Step 3 — prove the install before you use it

hpp doctor

It prints one line and exits 0:

HPP doctor: ok - modules=10 - hosts=claude-code, codex - hooks=18 (permission gates=9 - llm egress=0)

A non-zero exit here means the install is broken. Report the line and stop; do not continue to step 4 hoping it resolves itself.

Step 4 — read the plan to the person. DO NOT SKIP

hpp init --target <path-to-the-repository>

Without --apply, hpp init writes nothing. It runs six fixed stages and prints a plan of what it would write.

Read the plan aloud, and not only the lines to paste. When the chosen modules declare hooks, it prints a HOOK CAPABILITIES table before the WIRE block: for each hook, its events, its exit policy (observe, warn or block) and its capability groups. That table is what the hooks can do once wired; the paste lines alone are only file names. Leave --decision-advisor at off unless the person asked for it (new in 2.6.0).

Show that plan to the person and wait for them to say yes. Only then:

hpp init --target <path-to-the-repository> --apply

This is not ceremony. The plan is the only moment at which the person can see what is about to enter their repository, and an installer that writes before you read is the exact failure this harness exists to prevent. If you skip it, you have installed the harness by violating it.

Step 5 — Codex CLI wiring

Claude Code is wired by step 4. Codex CLI has a plugin channel of its own for the modules that carry skills (skills only; hooks stay off):

codex plugin marketplace add rusharlabs/house-party-protocol
codex plugin add <module>@house-party-protocol

Everything else — runtime, scripts, templates, and any module without skills — needs one more command per module:

installers/kit-forge-1.5.4/kit_doctor.py install --kit <kit> --host codex --target <repo> --apply

Skills land in .agents/skills; the full runtime lands in .agents/hpp. Hooks declared in hooks.json belong to Claude Code and are not activated on Codex. hpp init --host codex still prints the HOOK CAPABILITIES table; read it aloud as what those hooks would do on Claude Code, and say that none of them runs here rather than letting the person believe a gate is armed when it is not.

Step 6 — verify, and report the exit code, not your impression

hpp doctor
hpp benchmark

hpp benchmark reports pass@k and pass^k separately and prints its own gate verdict. Quote both outputs to the person. A transcript is not an exit code.

If hpp init printed a DOCUMENTATION section, point the person to the pages it names; each one was found on disk. A pip install carries no documentation pages, so after step 2 the section is absent — do not invent paths.

Exit codes

0 ok · 1 warn/manual · 2 block · 3 error.

Do not

Do not edit the versioned module directories. They are emitted artifacts. A hand edit makes their checksums diverge and the next install refuses them.
Do not lower a gate to get green. Fix the artifact the gate rejected.
Do not record credentials, personal paths, clients or private infrastructure anywhere the harness writes.
Do not treat healthy as correct. It proves freshness of the declared signal, nothing more.

Upgrading

Re-run step 2 with the new tag, then step 3. hpp init is idempotent: run it again and read the plan again. The plan is what changed.

If it fails

Run hpp doctor and quote the whole line. Open an issue at https://github.com/rusharlabs/house-party-protocol/issues with that line, your Python version and your host. Do not paste credentials, tokens or absolute paths from the person's machine.