beardrive/web/docs/src/content/docs/start/setup.md

title, description

title	description
Set up with your agent	You don't install BearDrive — you ask your agent to. One paste in Claude Code, Cowork, Codex, Gemini CLI, or Hermes, and the folder syncs from then on.

You don't set BearDrive up. Your agent does.

Give it one instruction and it installs the CLI, signs this machine in, connects the folder to a project, and registers the hooks that keep everything in sync — then tells you what it did. You never open a config file.

Any agent: one paste

Start the agent — Claude Code, Cowork, Codex, Gemini CLI, Hermes — in the folder you want synced, and paste:

Follow https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runbear-io/beardrive/main/INSTALL_FOR_AGENTS.md
to set up BearDrive project <project-id> on <hub-url>. Ask me which folder to
sync (the project is named "<project-name>").

The agent fetches that page and works through it — install the CLI, sign in (it prints a link you approve in the browser), connect the project, register the sync hooks. You copy one thing; the agent handles every deviation — already installed, no Homebrew, browser sign-in, wrong folder. On BearDrive Cloud, drop on <hub-url> — sign-in defaults to beardrive.ai.

The project name is in the prompt because the agent recommends a folder of the same name — so handbook on the hub is handbook/ on everyone's disk. Starting from nothing (no project id, no name), it recommends shared/ and names the new project shared.

If the folder turns out to be empty once it is connected, the agent offers one more choice: start from a structure, or from scratch. Four are shipped:

• Docs + decision records (docs/, decisions/) — the boring default, and the one to take if you are not sure.
• LLM wiki (sources/, wiki/, index.md, log.md) — you curate the raw material and ask the questions; the agent writes and maintains every page, keeps the index current, and health-checks the whole thing for stale claims and orphans. It suits accumulating knowledge over weeks — research, a competitor file, a company brain fed by transcripts and threads.
• PARA (projects/, areas/, resources/, archives/) — sorted by how actionable something is, with explicit archiving.
• Shared agent skills (.claude/skills/) — a skill library the whole team's agents load, kept current by syncing. See Give every agent on the team the same skills.

Each is a small skeleton plus an AGENTS.md telling every agent on the team where a new file goes, when something is archived or superseded, and what a good filename looks like. That file is the point; the folders are scaffolding. A folder that already has files in it is never restructured, and "from scratch" stays a real answer. The same choices appear when you create a project in the hub, and on the command line as bdrive init --template docs.

The hooks step is the durable part: once they are registered, every later session in every folder syncs automatically, with nothing to remember.

:::tip[Don't retype this for teammates] A project's home page in the hub shows this same paste with your hub URL and project id already filled in. Send people there. :::

What your agent just set up

The sync hooks, and nothing else you have to think about:

• a blocking pull when you send a message, so the agent always reads the team's current files — it also tells the agent your project's link convention, so it can hand you a hub link for any file it mentions;
• an async push after every file edit, so what it writes reaches everyone else within seconds;
• read tracking, so the hub's Dashboard can show what your agents actually read.

They go in the agent's user config, once per machine, and are a no-op outside BearDrive folders. Your agent also registers a login item, so syncing comes back on its own after a reboot rather than waiting for the next session. bdrive init registers them for you, so there is nothing extra to run — hooks in detail covers what gets written where.

Check it worked

Ask the agent — "is BearDrive set up in this folder?" — or look yourself:

bdrive status    # projects, daemon state, pending changes
bdrive hooks     # which agents on this machine sync automatically

Next

Your first hour — what the loop feels like once an agent is connected.

Would rather drive it yourself? Manual setup reaches the same place, command by command.