FAQ
Does rippy slow down my AI tool?
Section titled “Does rippy slow down my AI tool?”No. rippy is a static Rust binary that starts in under a millisecond and
exits as soon as it has printed its verdict. For practical purposes, the
overhead of running rippy on every Bash call is indistinguishable from
not running it.
What happens if rippy crashes or hits an internal error?
Section titled “What happens if rippy crashes or hits an internal error?”rippy fails open — it exits with code 1, and the AI tool treats
that as “no verdict” and falls back to its own default behavior. The
reasoning: rippy is a seatbelt, not a single point of failure. If you’d
rather fail closed, wrap the hook in a one-line shell script that maps
exit code 1 to 2.
Does rippy send any data over the network?
Section titled “Does rippy send any data over the network?”No. rippy is an entirely local tool. It reads config from your disk, reads the incoming command from stdin, optionally reads script files from disk (see File analysis), and writes the verdict to stdout. There is no telemetry, no update check, no outbound network call of any kind.
Can I use rippy without any config?
Section titled “Can I use rippy without any config?”Yes. Out of the box rippy ships with its built-in safe allowlist and
command handlers, which cover most common tools. Add a .rippy.toml
only when you want to customize the defaults (e.g. a deny rule on
git push --force with a specific message).
What about tokf?
Section titled “What about tokf?”rippy pairs with tokf, a CLI output compressor for LLM context. tokf can delegate permission decisions to rippy via its external permission engine hook, so you get compression and safety checks from one coherent pair of tools. See tokf’s external permission engine docs.
My tool / command isn’t handled — what do I do?
Section titled “My tool / command isn’t handled — what do I do?”Two options:
- Add an explicit rule in your
.rippy.tomlfile —allow,ask, ordenyworks for any command. (rippy allow <pattern>/rippy deny <pattern>will append the rule for you.) - Open an issue (or even better, a PR) at github.com/mpecan/rippy so the handler can ship for everyone.
Is rippy a security boundary?
Section titled “Is rippy a security boundary?”No — it’s a permission layer, not a sandbox. See Safety model for a detailed breakdown of what rippy protects against and what it doesn’t. Use it as part of defense in depth, not as your only line of defense.