This is a small quality-of-life feature, the addition of
`--compute-indices` to the CLI, which, if enabled, will compute and set
the `indices` field for each `FileMatch` returned by `run()`. Note we
only bother to compute `indices` once we have the top N results because
there could be a lot of intermediate "top N" results during the search
that are ultimately discarded.
When set, the indices are included in the JSON output when `--json` is
specified and the matching indices are displayed in bold when `--json`
is not specified.
Introduces support for `@` to trigger a fuzzy-filename search in the
composer. Under the hood, this leverages
https://crates.io/crates/nucleo-matcher to do the fuzzy matching and
https://crates.io/crates/ignore to build up the list of file candidates
(so that it respects `.gitignore`).
For simplicity (at least for now), we do not do any caching between
searches like VS Code does for its file search:
1d89ed699b/src/vs/workbench/services/search/node/rawSearchService.ts (L212-L218)
Because we do not do any caching, I saw queries take up to three seconds
on large repositories with hundreds of thousands of files. To that end,
we do not perform searches synchronously on each keystroke, but instead
dispatch an event to do the search on a background thread that
asynchronously reports back to the UI when the results are available.
This is largely handled by the `FileSearchManager` introduced in this
PR, which also has logic for debouncing requests so there is at most one
search in flight at a time.
While we could potentially polish and tune this feature further, it may
already be overengineered for how it will be used, in practice, so we
can improve things going forward if it turns out that this is not "good
enough" in the wild.
Note this feature does not work like `@` in the TypeScript CLI, which
was more like directory-based tab completion. In the Rust CLI, `@`
triggers a full-repo fuzzy-filename search.
Fixes https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/1261.
This is a major redesign of how sandbox configuration works and aims to
fix https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/1248. Specifically, it
replaces `sandbox_permissions` in `config.toml` (and the
`-s`/`--sandbox-permission` CLI flags) with a "table" with effectively
three variants:
```toml
# Safest option: full disk is read-only, but writes and network access are disallowed.
[sandbox]
mode = "read-only"
# The cwd of the Codex task is writable, as well as $TMPDIR on macOS.
# writable_roots can be used to specify additional writable folders.
[sandbox]
mode = "workspace-write"
writable_roots = [] # Optional, defaults to the empty list.
network_access = false # Optional, defaults to false.
# Disable sandboxing: use at your own risk!!!
[sandbox]
mode = "danger-full-access"
```
This should make sandboxing easier to reason about. While we have
dropped support for `-s`, the way it works now is:
- no flags => `read-only`
- `--full-auto` => `workspace-write`
- currently, there is no way to specify `danger-full-access` via a CLI
flag, but we will revisit that as part of
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/1254
Outstanding issue:
- As noted in the `TODO` on `SandboxPolicy::is_unrestricted()`, we are
still conflating sandbox preferences with approval preferences in that
case, which needs to be cleaned up.
This does not implement the full Login with ChatGPT experience, but it
should unblock people.
**What works**
* The `codex` multitool now has a `login` subcommand, so you can run
`codex login`, which should write `CODEX_HOME/auth.json` if you complete
the flow successfully. The TUI will now read the `OPENAI_API_KEY` from
`auth.json`.
* The TUI should refresh the token if it has expired and the necessary
information is in `auth.json`.
* There is a `LoginScreen` in the TUI that tells you to run `codex
login` if both (1) your model provider expects to use `OPENAI_API_KEY`
as its env var, and (2) `OPENAI_API_KEY` is not set.
**What does not work**
* The `LoginScreen` does not support the login flow from within the TUI.
Instead, it tells you to quit, run `codex login`, and then run `codex`
again.
* `codex exec` does read from `auth.json` yet, nor does it direct the
user to go through the login flow if `OPENAI_API_KEY` is not be found.
* The `maybeRedeemCredits()` function from `get-api-key.tsx` has not
been ported from TypeScript to `login_with_chatgpt.py` yet:
a67a67f325/codex-cli/src/utils/get-api-key.tsx (L84-L89)
**Implementation**
Currently, the OAuth flow requires running a local webserver on
`127.0.0.1:1455`. It seemed wasteful to incur the additional binary cost
of a webserver dependency in the Rust CLI just to support login, so
instead we implement this logic in Python, as Python has a `http.server`
module as part of its standard library. Specifically, we bundle the
contents of a single Python file as a string in the Rust CLI and then
use it to spawn a subprocess as `python3 -c
{{SOURCE_FOR_PYTHON_SERVER}}`.
As such, the most significant files in this PR are:
```
codex-rs/login/src/login_with_chatgpt.py
codex-rs/login/src/lib.rs
```
Now that the CLI may load `OPENAI_API_KEY` from the environment _or_
`CODEX_HOME/auth.json`, we need a new abstraction for reading/writing
this variable, so we introduce:
```
codex-rs/core/src/openai_api_key.rs
```
Note that `std::env::set_var()` is [rightfully] `unsafe` in Rust 2024,
so we use a LazyLock<RwLock<Option<String>>> to store `OPENAI_API_KEY`
so it is read in a thread-safe manner.
Ultimately, it should be possible to go through the entire login flow
from the TUI. This PR introduces a placeholder `LoginScreen` UI for that
right now, though the new `codex login` subcommand introduced in this PR
should be a viable workaround until the UI is ready.
**Testing**
Because the login flow is currently implemented in a standalone Python
file, you can test it without building any Rust code as follows:
```
rm -rf /tmp/codex_home && mkdir /tmp/codex_home
CODEX_HOME=/tmp/codex_home python3 codex-rs/login/src/login_with_chatgpt.py
```
For reference:
* the original TypeScript implementation was introduced in
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/963
* support for redeeming credits was later added in
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/974
This PR overhauls how active tool calls and completed tool calls are
displayed:
1. More use of colour to indicate success/failure and distinguish
between components like tool name+arguments
2. Previously, the entire `CallToolResult` was serialized to JSON and
pretty-printed. Now, we extract each individual `CallToolResultContent`
and print those
1. The previous solution was wasting space by unnecessarily showing
details of the `CallToolResult` struct to users, without formatting the
actual tool call results nicely
2. We're now able to show users more information from tool results in
less space, with nicer formatting when tools return JSON results
### Before:
<img width="1251" alt="Screenshot 2025-06-03 at 11 24 26"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5a58f222-219c-4c53-ace7-d887194e30cf"
/>
### After:
<img width="1265" alt="image"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/99fe54d0-9ebe-406a-855b-7aa529b91274"
/>
## Future Work
1. Integrate image tool result handling better. We should be able to
display images even if they're not the first `CallToolResultContent`
2. Users should have some way to view the full version of truncated tool
results
3. It would be nice to add some left padding for tool results, make it
more clear that they are results. This is doable, just a little fiddly
due to the way `first_visible_line` scrolling works
4. There's almost certainly a better way to format JSON than "all on 1
line with spaces to make Ratatui wrapping work". But I think that works
OK for now.
Previous to this PR, we always set `reasoning` when making a request
using the Responses API:
d7245cbbc9/codex-rs/core/src/client.rs (L108-L111)
Though if you tried to use the Rust CLI with `--model gpt-4.1`, this
would fail with:
```shell
"Unsupported parameter: 'reasoning.effort' is not supported with this model."
```
We take a cue from the TypeScript CLI, which does a check on the model
name:
d7245cbbc9/codex-cli/src/utils/agent/agent-loop.ts (L786-L789)
This PR does a similar check, though also adds support for the following
config options:
```
model_reasoning_effort = "low" | "medium" | "high" | "none"
model_reasoning_summary = "auto" | "concise" | "detailed" | "none"
```
This way, if you have a model whose name happens to start with `"o"` (or
`"codex"`?), you can set these to `"none"` to explicitly disable
reasoning, if necessary. (That said, it seems unlikely anyone would use
the Responses API with non-OpenAI models, but we provide an escape
hatch, anyway.)
This PR also updates both the TUI and `codex exec` to show `reasoning
effort` and `reasoning summaries` in the header.
The output of an MCP server tool call can be one of several types, but
to date, we treated all outputs as text by showing the serialized JSON
as the "tool output" in Codex:
25a9949c49/codex-rs/mcp-types/src/lib.rs (L96-L101)
This PR adds support for the `ImageContent` variant so we can now
display an image output from an MCP tool call.
In making this change, we introduce a new
`ResponseInputItem::McpToolCallOutput` variant so that we can work with
the `mcp_types::CallToolResult` directly when the function call is made
to an MCP server.
Though arguably the more significant change is the introduction of
`HistoryCell::CompletedMcpToolCallWithImageOutput`, which is a cell that
uses `ratatui_image` to render an image into the terminal. To support
this, we introduce `ImageRenderCache`, cache a
`ratatui_image::picker::Picker`, and `ensure_image_cache()` to cache the
appropriate scaled image data and dimensions based on the current
terminal size.
To test, I created a minimal `package.json`:
```json
{
"name": "kitty-mcp",
"version": "1.0.0",
"type": "module",
"description": "MCP that returns image of kitty",
"main": "index.js",
"dependencies": {
"@modelcontextprotocol/sdk": "^1.12.0"
}
}
```
with the following `index.js` to define the MCP server:
```js
#!/usr/bin/env node
import { McpServer } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/mcp.js";
import { StdioServerTransport } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/stdio.js";
import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import { join } from "node:path";
const IMAGE_URI = "image://Ada.png";
const server = new McpServer({
name: "Demo",
version: "1.0.0",
});
server.tool(
"get-cat-image",
"If you need a cat image, this tool will provide one.",
async () => ({
content: [
{ type: "image", data: await getAdaPngBase64(), mimeType: "image/png" },
],
})
);
server.resource("Ada the Cat", IMAGE_URI, async (uri) => {
const base64Image = await getAdaPngBase64();
return {
contents: [
{
uri: uri.href,
mimeType: "image/png",
blob: base64Image,
},
],
};
});
async function getAdaPngBase64() {
const __dirname = new URL(".", import.meta.url).pathname;
// From 9705ce2c59/assets/Ada.png
const filePath = join(__dirname, "Ada.png");
const imageData = await readFile(filePath);
const base64Image = imageData.toString("base64");
return base64Image;
}
const transport = new StdioServerTransport();
await server.connect(transport);
```
With the local changes from this PR, I added the following to my
`config.toml`:
```toml
[mcp_servers.kitty]
command = "node"
args = ["/Users/mbolin/code/kitty-mcp/index.js"]
```
Running the TUI from source:
```
cargo run --bin codex -- --model o3 'I need a picture of a cat'
```
I get:
<img width="732" alt="image"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/bf80b721-9ca0-4d81-aec7-77d6899e2869"
/>
Now, that said, I have only tested in iTerm and there is definitely some
funny business with getting an accurate character-to-pixel ratio
(sometimes the `CompletedMcpToolCallWithImageOutput` thinks it needs 10
rows to render instead of 4), so there is still work to be done here.
This PR introduces support for `-c`/`--config` so users can override
individual config values on the command line using `--config
name=value`. Example:
```
codex --config model=o4-mini
```
Making it possible to set arbitrary config values on the command line
results in a more flexible configuration scheme and makes it easier to
provide single-line examples that can be copy-pasted from documentation.
Effectively, it means there are four levels of configuration for some
values:
- Default value (e.g., `model` currently defaults to `o4-mini`)
- Value in `config.toml` (e.g., user could override the default to be
`model = "o3"` in their `config.toml`)
- Specifying `-c` or `--config` to override `model` (e.g., user can
include `-c model=o3` in their list of args to Codex)
- If available, a config-specific flag can be used, which takes
precedence over `-c` (e.g., user can specify `--model o3` in their list
of args to Codex)
Now that it is possible to specify anything that could be configured in
`config.toml` on the command line using `-c`, we do not need to have a
custom flag for every possible config option (which can clutter the
output of `--help`). To that end, as part of this PR, we drop support
for the `--disable-response-storage` flag, as users can now specify `-c
disable_response_storage=true` to get the equivalent functionality.
Under the hood, this works by loading the `config.toml` into a
`toml::Value`. Then for each `key=value`, we create a small synthetic
TOML file with `value` so that we can run the TOML parser to get the
equivalent `toml::Value`. We then parse `key` to determine the point in
the original `toml::Value` to do the insert/replace. Once all of the
overrides from `-c` args have been applied, the `toml::Value` is
deserialized into a `ConfigToml` and then the `ConfigOverrides` are
applied, as before.
Historically, we spawned the Seatbelt and Landlock sandboxes in
substantially different ways:
For **Seatbelt**, we would run `/usr/bin/sandbox-exec` with our policy
specified as an arg followed by the original command:
d1de7bb383/codex-rs/core/src/exec.rs (L147-L219)
For **Landlock/Seccomp**, we would do
`tokio::runtime::Builder::new_current_thread()`, _invoke
Landlock/Seccomp APIs to modify the permissions of that new thread_, and
then spawn the command:
d1de7bb383/codex-rs/core/src/exec_linux.rs (L28-L49)
While it is neat that Landlock/Seccomp supports applying a policy to
only one thread without having to apply it to the entire process, it
requires us to maintain two different codepaths and is a bit harder to
reason about. The tipping point was
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/1061, in which we had to start
building up the `env` in an unexpected way for the existing
Landlock/Seccomp approach to continue to work.
This PR overhauls things so that we do similar things for Mac and Linux.
It turned out that we were already building our own "helper binary"
comparable to Mac's `sandbox-exec` as part of the `cli` crate:
d1de7bb383/codex-rs/cli/Cargo.toml (L10-L12)
We originally created this to build a small binary to include with the
Node.js version of the Codex CLI to provide support for Linux
sandboxing.
Though the sticky bit is that, at this point, we still want to deploy
the Rust version of Codex as a single, standalone binary rather than a
CLI and a supporting sandboxing binary. To satisfy this goal, we use
"the arg0 trick," in which we:
* use `std::env::current_exe()` to get the path to the CLI that is
currently running
* use the CLI as the `program` for the `Command`
* set `"codex-linux-sandbox"` as arg0 for the `Command`
A CLI that supports sandboxing should check arg0 at the start of the
program. If it is `"codex-linux-sandbox"`, it must invoke
`codex_linux_sandbox::run_main()`, which runs the CLI as if it were
`codex-linux-sandbox`. When acting as `codex-linux-sandbox`, we make the
appropriate Landlock/Seccomp API calls and then use `execvp(3)` to spawn
the original command, so do _replace_ the process rather than spawn a
subprocess. Incidentally, we do this before starting the Tokio runtime,
so the process should only have one thread when `execvp(3)` is called.
Because the `core` crate that needs to spawn the Linux sandboxing is not
a CLI in its own right, this means that every CLI that includes `core`
and relies on this behavior has to (1) implement it and (2) provide the
path to the sandboxing executable. While the path is almost always
`std::env::current_exe()`, we needed to make this configurable for
integration tests, so `Config` now has a `codex_linux_sandbox_exe:
Option<PathBuf>` property to facilitate threading this through,
introduced in https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/1089.
This common pattern is now captured in
`codex_linux_sandbox::run_with_sandbox()` and all of the `main.rs`
functions that should use it have been updated as part of this PR.
The `codex-linux-sandbox` crate added to the Cargo workspace as part of
this PR now has the bulk of the Landlock/Seccomp logic, which makes
`core` a bit simpler. Indeed, `core/src/exec_linux.rs` and
`core/src/landlock.rs` were removed/ported as part of this PR. I also
moved the unit tests for this code into an integration test,
`linux-sandbox/tests/landlock.rs`, in which I use
`env!("CARGO_BIN_EXE_codex-linux-sandbox")` as the value for
`codex_linux_sandbox_exe` since `std::env::current_exe()` is not
appropriate in that case.
To date, when handling `shell` and `local_shell` tool calls, we were
spawning new processes using the environment inherited from the Codex
process itself. This means that the sensitive `OPENAI_API_KEY` that
Codex needs to talk to OpenAI models was made available to everything
run by `shell` and `local_shell`. While there are cases where that might
be useful, it does not seem like a good default.
This PR introduces a complex `shell_environment_policy` config option to
control the `env` used with these tool calls. It is inevitably a bit
complex so that it is possible to override individual components of the
policy so without having to restate the entire thing.
Details are in the updated `README.md` in this PR, but here is the
relevant bit that explains the individual fields of
`shell_environment_policy`:
| Field | Type | Default | Description |
| ------------------------- | -------------------------- | ------- |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| `inherit` | string | `core` | Starting template for the
environment:<br>`core` (`HOME`, `PATH`, `USER`, …), `all` (clone full
parent env), or `none` (start empty). |
| `ignore_default_excludes` | boolean | `false` | When `false`, Codex
removes any var whose **name** contains `KEY`, `SECRET`, or `TOKEN`
(case-insensitive) before other rules run. |
| `exclude` | array<string> | `[]` | Case-insensitive glob
patterns to drop after the default filter.<br>Examples: `"AWS_*"`,
`"AZURE_*"`. |
| `set` | table<string,string> | `{}` | Explicit key/value
overrides or additions – always win over inherited values. |
| `include_only` | array<string> | `[]` | If non-empty, a
whitelist of patterns; only variables that match _one_ pattern survive
the final step. (Generally used with `inherit = "all"`.) |
In particular, note that the default is `inherit = "core"`, so:
* if you have extra env variables that you want to inherit from the
parent process, use `inherit = "all"` and then specify `include_only`
* if you have extra env variables where you want to hardcode the values,
the default `inherit = "core"` will work fine, but then you need to
specify `set`
This configuration is not battle-tested, so we will probably still have
to play with it a bit. `core/src/exec_env.rs` has the critical business
logic as well as unit tests.
Though if nothing else, previous to this change:
```
$ cargo run --bin codex -- debug seatbelt -- printenv OPENAI_API_KEY
# ...prints OPENAI_API_KEY...
```
But after this change it does not print anything (as desired).
One final thing to call out about this PR is that the
`configure_command!` macro we use in `core/src/exec.rs` has to do some
complex logic with respect to how it builds up the `env` for the process
being spawned under Landlock/seccomp. Specifically, doing
`cmd.env_clear()` followed by `cmd.envs(&$env_map)` (which is arguably
the most intuitive way to do it) caused the Landlock unit tests to fail
because the processes spawned by the unit tests started failing in
unexpected ways! If we forgo `env_clear()` in favor of updating env vars
one at a time, the tests still pass. The comment in the code talks about
this a bit, and while I would like to investigate this more, I need to
move on for the moment, but I do plan to come back to it to fully
understand what is going on. For example, this suggests that we might
not be able to spawn a C program that calls `env_clear()`, which would
be...weird. We may still have to fiddle with our Landlock config if that
is the case.
When I originally wrote `elapsed.rs`, I realized we were using both
`std::time` and `chrono` with no real benefit of having both. We should
try to keep the `exec` subcommand trim (as it also buildable as a
standalone executable), so this helps tighten things up.
This is a large change to support a "history" feature like you would
expect in a shell like Bash.
History events are recorded in `$CODEX_HOME/history.jsonl`. Because it
is a JSONL file, it is straightforward to append new entries (as opposed
to the TypeScript file that uses `$CODEX_HOME/history.json`, so to be
valid JSON, each new entry entails rewriting the entire file). Because
it is possible for there to be multiple instances of Codex CLI writing
to `history.jsonl` at once, we use advisory file locking when working
with `history.jsonl` in `codex-rs/core/src/message_history.rs`.
Because we believe history is a sufficiently useful feature, we enable
it by default. Though to provide some safety, we set the file
permissions of `history.jsonl` to be `o600` so that other users on the
system cannot read the user's history. We do not yet support a default
list of `SENSITIVE_PATTERNS` as the TypeScript CLI does:
3fdf9df133/codex-cli/src/utils/storage/command-history.ts (L10-L17)
We are going to take a more conservative approach to this list in the
Rust CLI. For example, while `/\b[A-Za-z0-9-_]{20,}\b/` might exclude
sensitive information like API tokens, it would also exclude valuable
information such as references to Git commits.
As noted in the updated documentation, users can opt-out of history by
adding the following to `config.toml`:
```toml
[history]
persistence = "none"
```
Because `history.jsonl` could, in theory, be quite large, we take a[n
arguably overly pedantic] approach in reading history entries into
memory. Specifically, we start by telling the client the current number
of entries in the history file (`history_entry_count`) as well as the
inode (`history_log_id`) of `history.jsonl` (see the new fields on
`SessionConfiguredEvent`).
The client is responsible for keeping new entries in memory to create a
"local history," but if the user hits up enough times to go "past" the
end of local history, then the client should use the new
`GetHistoryEntryRequest` in the protocol to fetch older entries.
Specifically, it should pass the `history_log_id` it was given
originally and work backwards from `history_entry_count`. (It should
really fetch history in batches rather than one-at-a-time, but that is
something we can improve upon in subsequent PRs.)
The motivation behind this crazy scheme is that it is designed to defend
against:
* The `history.jsonl` being truncated during the session such that the
index into the history is no longer consistent with what had been read
up to that point. We do not yet have logic to enforce a `max_bytes` for
`history.jsonl`, but once we do, we will aspire to implement it in a way
that should result in a new inode for the file on most systems.
* New items from concurrent Codex CLI sessions amending to the history.
Because, in absence of truncation, `history.jsonl` is an append-only
log, so long as the client reads backwards from `history_entry_count`,
it should always get a consistent view of history. (That said, it will
not be able to read _new_ commands from concurrent sessions, but perhaps
we will introduce a `/` command to reload latest history or something
down the road.)
Admittedly, my testing of this feature thus far has been fairly light. I
expect we will find bugs and introduce enhancements/fixes going forward.
Previously, running Codex as an MCP server required a standalone binary
in our Cargo workspace, but this PR makes it available as a subcommand
(`mcp`) of the main CLI.
Ran this with:
```
RUST_LOG=debug npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector cargo run --bin codex -- mcp
```
and verified it worked as expected in the inspector at
`http://127.0.0.1:6274/`.
Introduces support for slash commands like in the TypeScript CLI. We do
not support the full set of commands yet, but the core abstraction is
there now.
In particular, we have a `SlashCommand` enum and due to thoughtful use
of the [strum](https://crates.io/crates/strum) crate, it requires
minimal boilerplate to add a new command to the list.
The key new piece of UI is `CommandPopup`, though the keyboard events
are still handled by `ChatComposer`. The behavior is roughly as follows:
* if the first character in the composer is `/`, the command popup is
displayed (if you really want to send a message to Codex that starts
with a `/`, simply put a space before the `/`)
* while the popup is displayed, up/down can be used to change the
selection of the popup
* if there is a selection, hitting tab completes the command, but does
not send it
* if there is a selection, hitting enter sends the command
* if the prefix of the composer matches a command, the command will be
visible in the popup so the user can see the description (commands could
take arguments, so additional text may appear after the command name
itself)
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/39c3e6ee-eeb7-4ef7-a911-466d8184975f
Incidentally, Codex wrote almost all the code for this PR!
* update `SessionConfigured` event to include the UUID for the session
* show the UUID in the Rust TUI
* use local timestamps in log files instead of UTC
* include timestamps in log file names for easier discovery
This introduces a much-needed "profile" concept where users can specify
a collection of options under one name and then pass that via
`--profile` to the CLI.
This PR introduces the `ConfigProfile` struct and makes it a field of
`CargoToml`. It further updates
`Config::load_from_base_config_with_overrides()` to respect
`ConfigProfile`, overriding default values where appropriate. A detailed
unit test is added at the end of `config.rs` to verify this behavior.
Details on how to use this feature have also been added to
`codex-rs/README.md`.
This adds support for saving transcripts when using the Rust CLI. Like
the TypeScript CLI, it saves the transcript to `~/.codex/sessions`,
though it uses JSONL for the file format (and `.jsonl` for the file
extension) so that even if Codex crashes, what was written to the
`.jsonl` file should generally still be valid JSONL content.
This introduces the use of the `tui-markdown` crate to parse an
assistant message as Markdown and style it using ANSI for a better user
experience. As shown in the screenshot below, it has support for syntax
highlighting for _tagged_ fenced code blocks:
<img width="907" alt="image"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/900dc229-80bb-46e8-b1bb-efee4c70ba3c"
/>
That said, `tui-markdown` is not as configurable (or stylish!) as
https://www.npmjs.com/package/marked-terminal, which is what we use in
the TypeScript CLI. In particular:
* The styles are hardcoded and `tui_markdown::from_str()` does not take
any options whatsoever. It uses "bold white" for inline code style which
does not stand out as much as the yellow used by `marked-terminal`:
65402cbda7/tui-markdown/src/lib.rs (L464)
I asked Codex to take a first pass at this and it came up with:
https://github.com/joshka/tui-markdown/pull/80
* If a fenced code block is not tagged, then it does not get
highlighted. I would rather add some logic here:
65402cbda7/tui-markdown/src/lib.rs (L262)
that uses something like https://pypi.org/project/guesslang/ to examine
the value of `text` and try to use the appropriate syntax highlighter.
* When we have a fenced code block, we do not want to show the opening
and closing triple backticks in the output.
To unblock ourselves, we might want to bundle our own fork of
`tui-markdown` temporarily until we figure out what the shape of the API
should be and then try to upstream it.
I started this PR because I wanted to share the `format_duration()`
utility function in `codex-rs/exec/src/event_processor.rs` with the TUI.
The question was: where to put it?
`core` should have as few dependencies as possible, so moving it there
would introduce a dependency on `chrono`, which seemed undesirable.
`core` already had this `cli` feature to deal with a similar situation
around sharing common utility functions, so I decided to:
* make `core` feature-free
* introduce `common`
* `common` can have as many "special interest" features as it needs,
each of which can declare their own deps
* the first two features of common are `cli` and `elapsed`
In practice, this meant updating a number of `Cargo.toml` files,
replacing this line:
```toml
codex-core = { path = "../core", features = ["cli"] }
```
with these:
```toml
codex-core = { path = "../core" }
codex-common = { path = "../common", features = ["cli"] }
```
Moving `format_duration()` into its own file gave it some "breathing
room" to add a unit test, so I had Codex generate some tests and new
support for durations over 1 minute.
This adds initial support for MCP servers in the style of Claude Desktop
and Cursor. Note this PR is the bare minimum to get things working end
to end: all configured MCP servers are launched every time Codex is run,
there is no recovery for MCP servers that crash, etc.
(Also, I took some shortcuts to change some fields of `Session` to be
`pub(crate)`, which also means there are circular deps between
`codex.rs` and `mcp_tool_call.rs`, but I will clean that up in a
subsequent PR.)
`codex-rs/README.md` is updated as part of this PR to explain how to use
this feature. There is a bit of plumbing to route the new settings from
`Config` to the business logic in `codex.rs`. The most significant
chunks for new code are in `mcp_connection_manager.rs` (which defines
the `McpConnectionManager` struct) and `mcp_tool_call.rs`, which is
responsible for tool calls.
This PR also introduces new `McpToolCallBegin` and `McpToolCallEnd`
event types to the protocol, but does not add any handlers for them.
(See https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/836 for initial usage.)
To test, I added the following to my `~/.codex/config.toml`:
```toml
# Local build of https://github.com/hideya/mcp-server-weather-js
[mcp_servers.weather]
command = "/Users/mbolin/code/mcp-server-weather-js/dist/index.js"
args = []
```
And then I ran the following:
```
codex-rs$ cargo run --bin codex exec 'what is the weather in san francisco'
[2025-05-06T22:40:05] Task started: 1
[2025-05-06T22:40:18] Agent message: Here’s the latest National Weather Service forecast for San Francisco (downtown, near 37.77° N, 122.42° W):
This Afternoon (Tue):
• Sunny, high near 69 °F
• West-southwest wind around 12 mph
Tonight:
• Partly cloudy, low around 52 °F
• SW wind 7–10 mph
...
```
Note that Codex itself is not able to make network calls, so it would
not normally be able to get live weather information like this. However,
the weather MCP is [currently] not run under the Codex sandbox, so it is
able to hit `api.weather.gov` and fetch current weather information.
---
[//]: # (BEGIN SAPLING FOOTER)
Stack created with [Sapling](https://sapling-scm.com). Best reviewed
with [ReviewStack](https://reviewstack.dev/openai/codex/pull/829).
* #836
* __->__ #829
Cleans up the signature for `new_stdio_client()` to more closely mirror
how MCP servers are declared in config files (`command`, `args`, `env`).
Also takes a cue from Claude Code where the MCP server is launched with
a restricted `env` so that it only includes "safe" things like `USER`
and `PATH` (see the `create_env_for_mcp_server()` function introduced in
this PR for details) by default, as it is common for developers to have
sensitive API keys present in their environment that should only be
forwarded to the MCP server when the user has explicitly configured it
to do so.
---
[//]: # (BEGIN SAPLING FOOTER)
Stack created with [Sapling](https://sapling-scm.com). Best reviewed
with [ReviewStack](https://reviewstack.dev/openai/codex/pull/831).
* #829
* __->__ #831
This PR introduces an initial `McpClient` that we will use to give Codex
itself programmatic access to foreign MCPs. This does not wire it up in
Codex itself yet, but the new `mcp-client` crate includes a `main.rs`
for basic testing for now.
Manually tested by sending a `tools/list` request to Codex's own MCP
server:
```
codex-rs$ cargo build
codex-rs$ cargo run --bin codex-mcp-client ./target/debug/codex-mcp-server
{
"tools": [
{
"description": "Run a Codex session. Accepts configuration parameters matching the Codex Config struct.",
"inputSchema": {
"properties": {
"approval-policy": {
"description": "Execution approval policy expressed as the kebab-case variant name (`unless-allow-listed`, `auto-edit`, `on-failure`, `never`).",
"enum": [
"auto-edit",
"unless-allow-listed",
"on-failure",
"never"
],
"type": "string"
},
"cwd": {
"description": "Working directory for the session. If relative, it is resolved against the server process's current working directory.",
"type": "string"
},
"disable-response-storage": {
"description": "Disable server-side response storage.",
"type": "boolean"
},
"model": {
"description": "Optional override for the model name (e.g. \"o3\", \"o4-mini\")",
"type": "string"
},
"prompt": {
"description": "The *initial user prompt* to start the Codex conversation.",
"type": "string"
},
"sandbox-permissions": {
"description": "Sandbox permissions using the same string values accepted by the CLI (e.g. \"disk-write-cwd\", \"network-full-access\").",
"items": {
"enum": [
"disk-full-read-access",
"disk-write-cwd",
"disk-write-platform-user-temp-folder",
"disk-write-platform-global-temp-folder",
"disk-full-write-access",
"network-full-access"
],
"type": "string"
},
"type": "array"
}
},
"required": [
"prompt"
],
"type": "object"
},
"name": "codex"
}
]
}
```
This PR replaces the placeholder `"echo"` tool call in the MCP server
with a `"codex"` tool that calls Codex. Events such as
`ExecApprovalRequest` and `ApplyPatchApprovalRequest` are not handled
properly yet, but I have `approval_policy = "never"` set in my
`~/.codex/config.toml` such that those codepaths are not exercised.
The schema for this MPC tool is defined by a new `CodexToolCallParam`
struct introduced in this PR. It is fairly similar to `ConfigOverrides`,
as the param is used to help create the `Config` used to start the Codex
session, though it also includes the `prompt` used to kick off the
session.
This PR also introduces the use of the third-party `schemars` crate to
generate the JSON schema, which is verified in the
`verify_codex_tool_json_schema()` unit test.
Events that are dispatched during the Codex session are sent back to the
MCP client as MCP notifications. This gives the client a way to monitor
progress as the tool call itself may take minutes to complete depending
on the complexity of the task requested by the user.
In the video below, I launched the server via:
```shell
mcp-server$ RUST_LOG=debug npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector cargo run --
```
In the video, you can see the flow of:
* requesting the list of tools
* choosing the **codex** tool
* entering a value for **prompt** and then making the tool call
Note that I left the other fields blank because when unspecified, the
values in my `~/.codex/config.toml` were used:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/1975058c-b004-43ef-8c8d-800a953b8192
Note that while using the inspector, I did run into
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/inspector/issues/293, though the
tip about ensuring I had only one instance of the **MCP Inspector** tab
open in my browser seemed to fix things.
This adds our own `mcp-types` crate to our Cargo workspace. We vendor in
the
[`2025-03-26/schema.json`](05f2045136/schema/2025-03-26/schema.json)
from the MCP repo and introduce a `generate_mcp_types.py` script to
codegen the `lib.rs` from the JSON schema.
Test coverage is currently light, but I plan to refine things as we
start making use of this crate.
And yes, I am aware that
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/rust-sdk exists, though the
published https://crates.io/crates/rmcp appears to be a competing
effort. While things are up in the air, it seems better for us to
control our own version of this code.
Incidentally, Codex did a lot of the work for this PR. I told it to
never edit `lib.rs` directly and instead to update
`generate_mcp_types.py` and then re-run it to update `lib.rs`. It
followed these instructions and once things were working end-to-end, I
iteratively asked for changes to the tests until the API looked
reasonable (and the code worked). Codex was responsible for figuring out
what to do to `generate_mcp_types.py` to achieve the requested test/API
changes.
For now, keep things simple such that we never update the `version` in
the `Cargo.toml` for the workspace root on the `main` branch. Instead,
create a new branch for a release, push one commit that updates the
`version`, and then tag that branch to kick off a release.
To test, I ran this script and created this release job:
https://github.com/openai/codex/actions/runs/14762580641
The generated DotSlash file has URLs that refer to
`https://github.com/openai/codex/releases/`, so let's set
`prerelease:false` (but keep `draft:true` for now) so those URLs should
work.
Also updated `version` in Cargo workspace so I will kick off a build
once this lands.
@oai-ragona and I discussed it, and we feel the REPL crate has served
its purpose, so we're going to delete the code and future archaeologists
can find it in Git history.
Apparently I made two key mistakes in
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/740 (fixed in this PR):
* I forgot to redefine `$dest` in the `Stage Linux-only artifacts` step
* I did not define the `if` check correctly in the `Stage Linux-only
artifacts` step
This fixes both of those issues and bumps the workspace version to
`0.0.2504292006` in preparation for another release attempt.
Originally, the `interactive` crate was going to be a placeholder for
building out a UX that was comparable to that of the existing TypeScript
CLI. Though after researching how Ratatui works, that seems difficult to
do because it is designed around the idea that it will redraw the full
screen buffer each time (and so any scrolling should be "internal" to
your Ratatui app) whereas the TypeScript CLI expects to render the full
history of the conversation every time(*) (which is why you can use your
terminal scrollbar to scroll it).
While it is possible to use Ratatui in a way that acts more like what
the TypeScript CLI is doing, it is awkward and seemingly results in
tedious code, so I think we should abandon that approach. As such, this
PR deletes the `interactive/` folder and the code that depended on it.
Further, since we added support for mousewheel scrolling in the TUI in
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/641, it certainly feels much better
and the need for scroll support via the terminal scrollbar is greatly
diminished. This is now a more appropriate default UX for the
"multitool" CLI.
(*) Incidentally, I haven't verified this, but I think this results in
O(N^2) work in rendering, which seems potentially problematic for long
conversations.
In putting up https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/665, I discovered
that the `expanduser` crate does not compile on Windows. Looking into
it, we do not seem to need it because we were only using it with a value
that was passed in via a command-line flag, so the shell expands `~` for
us before we see it, anyway. (I changed the type in `Cli` from `String`
to `PathBuf`, to boot.)
If we do need this sort of functionality in the future,
https://docs.rs/shellexpand/latest/shellexpand/fn.tilde.html seems
promising.
As described in detail in `codex-rs/execpolicy/README.md` introduced in
this PR, `execpolicy` is a tool that lets you define a set of _patterns_
used to match [`execv(3)`](https://linux.die.net/man/3/execv)
invocations. When a pattern is matched, `execpolicy` returns the parsed
version in a structured form that is amenable to static analysis.
The primary use case is to define patterns match commands that should be
auto-approved by a tool such as Codex. This supports a richer pattern
matching mechanism that the sort of prefix-matching we have done to
date, e.g.:
5e40d9d221/codex-cli/src/approvals.ts (L333-L354)
Note we are still playing with the API and the `system_path` option in
particular still needs some work.
As stated in `codex-rs/README.md`:
Today, Codex CLI is written in TypeScript and requires Node.js 22+ to
run it. For a number of users, this runtime requirement inhibits
adoption: they would be better served by a standalone executable. As
maintainers, we want Codex to run efficiently in a wide range of
environments with minimal overhead. We also want to take advantage of
operating system-specific APIs to provide better sandboxing, where
possible.
To that end, we are moving forward with a Rust implementation of Codex
CLI contained in this folder, which has the following benefits:
- The CLI compiles to small, standalone, platform-specific binaries.
- Can make direct, native calls to
[seccomp](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/seccomp.2.html) and
[landlock](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/landlock.7.html) in
order to support sandboxing on Linux.
- No runtime garbage collection, resulting in lower memory consumption
and better, more predictable performance.
Currently, the Rust implementation is materially behind the TypeScript
implementation in functionality, so continue to use the TypeScript
implmentation for the time being. We will publish native executables via
GitHub Releases as soon as we feel the Rust version is usable.
