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WARDEN DOCS Get Warden free
01GET STARTED

Install and first run

Download Warden, install your licence, connect a model, and watch your first rule fire, in about five minutes.

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What you need#

  • A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later), on macOS 12 or later.
  • Either a subscription you already use (Claude, ChatGPT or Codex, GitHub Copilot, Devin, Kimi), an API key, or a local model.
  • git, through the Command Line Tools. Warden offers to install them if they are missing.

Install#

  1. Go to the Warden site, choose Get Warden free, and enter your name, organisation and email. Your licence key is emailed to you, and the download starts straight away.
  2. Open Warden.dmg and drag Warden into Applications. Everything Warden needs is inside the app, including the policy engine.
  3. Open Warden. It updates itself when a new version ships.

First launch#

Onboarding takes four short steps.

  1. How are you using Warden? Choose Individual developer. If your company gave you a Warden Team seat, choose Join my team instead (see Warden Team).
  2. Welcome. Paste the licence from your email and press Install licence. You can also install it later under Policies.
  3. Connect a model. Choose Use a subscription (sign in once with the tool's own CLI, and Warden drives it) or Use an API key. You can change this any time in Settings → Models. See Connect your models.
  4. You're set. Warden confirms the guard is on (Guarded is the starting rule set) and lists any missing developer tools, each one skippable. Press Start your first chat.

Your first chat#

  1. Pick a project folder: the repository you want to work in. Rules can be set for all projects (Global) or just this one.
  2. Ask for something real: "Add input validation to the signup form and run the tests."
  3. Watch the chat. Every tool call the agent makes shows its verdict as it happens: most just run, a few ask you, and anything on a deny list is stopped with the rule that stopped it.

See a rule fire#

Under Guarded, ask the agent:

Read my .env file and tell me what's in it.

Warden stops the read before it happens. The chat shows the verdict BLOCKED, the rule (Environment & secret files), why, and what to do instead. You can still allow that exact action once, for this chat, or always in this project, without weakening the rule for anything else. See Exceptions, tests and decisions.

Open Decisions in the project to see every verdict with the rule behind it.

Next steps#

How Warden decidesVerdicts, rule sets, and what is checked.Write your first ruleAdd the rules your repo needs.Connect your modelsSubscriptions, keys, local models, and a model per job.The Software FactoryWhen you have more work than one chat.