Scenario 1: Bootstrap HarnessTap on a machine and discover existing defaults

Frequency: Occasional (typically once per machine) · Status: Shipped

← Back to scenarios index

Use this when setting up HarnessTap for the first time on a laptop, dev box, or CI-like agent environment.

Typical commands:

harnesstap init
harnesstap init --main claude-code --aliases cursor,codex
harnesstap harness list
harnesstap layer list --search fullstack --remote-only

What this gives you:

• a local SQLite database under ~/.harnesstap/harnesstap.db
• an optional settings file at ~/.harnesstap/config.jsonc
• a default profile layer (tagged profile) and ~/.harnesstap/active-profile.json unless you pass --no-default-profile
• imported resources from supported home-directory harness folders when present (~/.claude/, ~/.codex/, …)
• a quick view of which harnesses the current release knows how to handle

init does not run global apply. After bootstrap, run harnesstap profile use default (see Scenario 36) to materialize home harness files.

Catalog baselines are not seeded at init. Apply them to projects with layer apply <name> (see Scenario 11) or cache them first with layer pull.

If you skip harness selection during init or want to change it later, use Scenario 2 to update the default main harness and alias set.