Concepts

This section explains the moving parts an outrig user actually has to think about. If you’ve worked through the Quickstart, you’ve already touched all four – this is where they’re spelled out.

• Containers – the Dockerfile that defines the agent’s environment, the [containers.<name>] config block, named container-configs for switching between toolsets, and the UID/GID convention that keeps file ownership sane.
• MCP Servers – how outrig discovers and routes tool calls, the <server>__<tool> name prefix, lifecycle and crash behavior, stderr capture.
• MCP Trust Model – why the container is the MCP trust boundary and why tools can be configured liberally inside it.
• Workspace – what the agent can reach on your filesystem, the direct bind-mount model, why outrig doesn’t stage changes, how to review with git.
• Providers, Models, and Agents – the three-layer LLM config: providers (where), models (what), agents (which preamble + container). Most users keep providers and models in the global config; agents are typically per-repo.
• In-process LLMs – a feature-gated provider that runs the model inside the outrig process itself, for questions whose content must not leave the host. Plumbing for the future egress filter, tool-use filter, and prompt-injection scanner.