Dossier

Dossier is a Kujo-native, local-first evidence ledger for claims, sources, captured support, classifications, conflicts, quotations, consent, freshness, and rights. It gives editors, agents, CI jobs, and review workflows a portable record of what a material claim may honestly rely on.

Production capabilities

Dossier is ready for serious standalone evidence operations with immutable records, append-only audit events, atomic writes, bounded queries, strict claim and evidence taxonomies, secret rejection, deterministic fixtures, detached packet signatures, configurable freshness, offline citations, optional AES-256-GCM storage, bounded streaming, concurrency checks, retention receipts, and fail-closed validation. It never turns a URL into verification, inference into fact, or a recorded assertion into granted rights, consent, or approval.

See the production review and completed hardening worklist.

Quick install

git clone https://github.com/kujolang/dossier.git
cd dossier
export KUJO_BIN=/absolute/path/to/kujo
export PATH="$PWD/bin:$PATH"
dossier --version --json
dossier doctor --json

Dossier requires Kujo 1.0.1 or newer and has no required database, provider, model, or network dependency.

Quick start

dossier init --state .dossier --json
dossier claim add --input fixtures/core.json \
  --actor standards-editor --timestamp 2026-08-14T12:00:00Z --json
dossier report --limit 100 --json
dossier validate --json

Commands

Command group	Purpose
claim add, claim show	Create and inspect material claims.
source add	Record source identity, type, and retrieval time.
evidence attach, evidence classify	Bind exact captured support and an explicit evidence state.
conflict add	Preserve disagreement between multiple sources.
quote add	Record exact quotation text, speaker, source, and approval status.
consent record, rights record	Preserve scoped assertions without granting authority.
freshness check, verify, validate	Validate stored record and contract integrity.
packet, report, export	Create and emit bounded portable evidence collections.
history, doctor, version	Inspect operation, health, and compatibility.

Common flags include --state, --config, --input, --actor, --timestamp, --id, --path, --type, --after, --limit, --output, --force, --dry-run, and --json. --force can replace only an explicitly named safe export; it never bypasses evidence or authority checks. Exit codes are 0 success, 1 operational/validation failure, and 2 usage error.

Evidence model

Claims distinguish fact, observation, inference, opinion, and hypothesis. Evidence distinguishes verified, observed, inferred, opinion, hypothesis, planned, conflicted, expired, unavailable, and rejected states. A verified evidence record requires exact source location, captured support, checksum, retrieval time, and reviewer identity.

State defaults to .dossier/. JSON records are immutable, history is append-only, exports are atomic, and all inputs and query sizes are bounded. Traversal, symlinks, malformed JSON, incompatible schema majors, duplicate IDs, secret-shaped fields, and unsafe overwrites fail closed. See contracts and security.

Project structure and verification

The canonical entrypoint is dossier.kujo; all implementation modules live in src/. Tests, fixtures, schemas, scripts, and documentation are separated by purpose. Run the complete gate with:

bash scripts/validate.sh

CI builds the pinned Kujo runtime and runs the same gate. Hosted providers are optional and are not required for core operation.