Roaming Agents

Roaming agents let you reach a running goose agent from another machine over a peer-to-peer connection — no open ports, no VPN, no server to host. It's built on iroh (QUIC), so two machines can connect directly or via a relay, typically without any firewall changes.

Opt-in build required

Roaming is an optional, experimental feature that is not included in released goose binaries. Every command in this guide requires a goose built from source with the roaming feature enabled:

cargo build --release -p goose-cli --features roaming

On a default build, goose roam reports an unrecognized subcommand.

Roaming is designed to be embedded: the transport is a standalone Rust crate (goose-roaming) with no dependency on goose's agent internals, the CLI exposes it as goose roam commands, and there are wasm bindings for browser apps. If you build on goose — or just want an authenticated p2p ACP transport — you can use the same pieces directly. The web client (covered near the end) is a reference client built entirely on this public surface.

Use it to drive your laptop's agent from another device, hand a one-shot task to a remote agent, expose a remote agent to any local ACP client (like an editor), or wire p2p agent access into your own application.

The core idea: roaming is an ACP transport

Roaming does exactly one thing: it provides an authenticated, peer-to-peer ACP transport. The host runs goose's real ACP server; the connecting side is an ACP client. That's it.

Everything that feels "session-shaped" is therefore just plain ACP that happens to run over a roaming connection — not a bespoke roaming feature:

You want to…	It's just ACP…	Command
List the remote's sessions	session/list	roam delegate <target> --list-sessions
Continue a specific session	session/load	roam delegate <target> --session <id> "…"
Run a fresh one-shot task	session/new + session/prompt	roam delegate <target> "…"
Drive a remote agent from a real UI	full ACP surface	roam bridge → Zed or another ACP editor
Quick interactive peek	a built-in REPL	roam connect

Because the connection carries the full ACP surface, the connecting side can enumerate, create, and resume the host's sessions with no roaming-specific protocol. Higher-level behaviours (saved peers) sit above the transport and are described below.

note

Roaming is an optional, experimental feature. It's available when goose is built with the roaming feature (cargo build -p goose-cli --features roaming).

How it works: cards and mutual acceptance

Trust is a mutual, public-key relationship — like WireGuard or SSH known-hosts, and deliberately infrastructural. Each node has one long-lived identity and produces a connection card: a shareable string containing its public key and how to reach it (relay URLs). Nothing in a card is secret — possessing one grants no access.

To let a peer reach you, you each:

1. Swap cards (goose roam id prints yours; send it over any channel).
2. Accept the other's key (goose roam peers accept …).

Since a card is just a string, it can travel however is convenient — including as a QR code: goose roam id --qr and goose roam share --qr also render the card as a QR code in the terminal, which you can scan from a phone camera (or directly from the web client's camera, see below) instead of copy-pasting.

A connection only succeeds when the host has accepted the dialer's key. The transport (iroh QUIC-TLS) proves each side holds the private key for the identity in its card, so no one can impersonate a key, and a leaked card lets no one in. There is no bearer token that grants access by possession.

┌────────────┐    swap cards     ┌────────────┐
│  Machine A │ ◀───────────────▶ │  Machine B │
│            │  each accepts the │            │
│  roam share│  other's key      │ roam connect│
│  (agent)   │ ◀═══ ACP over ══▶ │ /delegate/ │
└────────────┘   iroh + relay    │  bridge    │
                                 └────────────┘

Each connecting client gets its own agent and drives its own sessions over the full ACP surface. (Simultaneous multi-viewer "co-driving" of one live session is a possible future feature, not part of this ACP-transport model.)

Using the CLI

Quick start

Say machine B wants to drive machine A's agent. Both run goose roam id and send each other the card it prints. Then:

On machine A (the host): add B's card and accept its key.

goose roam peers add 'goose+roam://…B…' laptop-b
goose roam peers accept laptop-b          # grants control by default
goose roam share                          # serve to accepted peers

share keeps running and prints A's card too. The agent runs in the directory share was started in (override with --cwd <dir>); the connecting side's own directory is always ignored.

On machine B (the client): add A's card and connect.

goose roam peers add 'goose+roam://…A…' laptop-a
goose roam connect laptop-a

You get an interactive prompt that drives the agent on machine A. Type a message and press enter; /quit or Ctrl-D to leave.

connect is a minimal built-in chat loop — handy for a quick sanity check. For real work, prefer bridge (drive the remote agent from a full ACP client) or delegate (scriptable one-shot tasks).

For the common "pair a new device" case there is also a one-step helper: goose roam pair shows this node's card as a QR code, reads the device's card from stdin, and saves + accepts it in one go (the equivalent of peers add + peers accept).

tip

Compare the short fingerprint shown by roam id / peers accept out of band (e.g. read it aloud) to be sure you accepted the key you meant to.

One-shot delegation

To send a single task and get the answer back — no interactive session:

goose roam delegate 'goose+roam://…' "Summarize the last 5 commits in this repo."

The remote agent runs the task with its own tools and prints its final response. delegate is a thin ACP client, so it can also work with the remote's existing sessions — all plain ACP under the hood:

# List the remote agent's sessions (session/list)
goose roam delegate 'goose+roam://…' --list-sessions

# Continue a specific session instead of starting fresh (session/load)
goose roam delegate 'goose+roam://…' --session <SESSION_ID> "Now fix the first failure."

Bridging to any ACP client

connect and delegate embed goose's own ACP client. bridge does the opposite: it exposes a remote agent as a local ACP endpoint, so any ACP client — Zed or another editor — can drive it as if it were running locally. It runs no UI and no agent of its own; it transparently proxies ACP bytes between the local client and the remote agent.

Bridge over stdio (the default — for a client that launches goose as a subprocess):

goose roam bridge 'goose+roam://…'

Configure your ACP client to run goose roam bridge '<card>' as its agent command. It will speak ACP on the process's stdin/stdout, and every request is forwarded to the remote agent.

Or bridge over a local TCP port, for a client that connects to an address:

goose roam bridge laptop --listen 127.0.0.1:8900

This accepts a single ACP connection on that address and proxies it to the remote agent. Saved peer names work here too.

Because a default share serves the full ACP surface, a bridged client gets everything — it can list, create, and load the host's sessions, not just a single pre-selected one.

note

A bridge serves one client connection. The remote host still runs the agent, imposes its own working directory, and authorizes the connection.

Embedding roaming in your own app

Everything above is built on the goose-roaming crate (crates/goose-roaming), and you can use it directly. The crate deliberately has zero dependency on goose core — it knows nothing about agents or sessions, only about identity, trust, and authenticated byte streams — so you can embed it in any Rust application, with or without goose.

The surface a consumer touches:

• RoamingIdentity — a persisted ed25519 node key whose public half is the iroh endpoint id (RoamingIdentity::generate() for ephemeral, default_key_path for the on-disk one goose uses).
• RoamingConfig — a builder for a node: RoamingConfig::new(identity) plus chainers like .with_relay(RelaySettings::…) and .with_bind_addr(addr). Defaults to iroh's public relays and an empty allowlist (accepts no one), so the safe default is built in.
• RoamingNode — the node itself. RoamingNode::bind(config) binds the endpoint; node.share(server) hosts an agent to accepted peers; node.connect(&card, label) / node.connect_with_addr(addr, label) dial a remote and return a RoamingClientStream (use .into_futures_io() to get plain async read/write halves); node.card() produces the shareable card.
• AcpStreamServer — the trait your host side implements to plug in "the agent". It has two methods — serve_stream (drive your protocol over an authorized stream for an accepted peer) and agent_id (a display id sent in the handshake ack) — and that's the entire integration seam. goose-cli's FullAcpBridge implements it by handing the stream to goose's real ACP serve; your app can serve anything.
• TrustBook — the mutual allowlist of accepted peer keys, with durable persistence and fail-closed reload. node.trust() gives you a handle to accept or revoke keys at runtime.
• ConnectionCard — the non-secret identity + reachability string (goose+roam://…), with encode() / parsing and a short fingerprint() for out-of-band verification.

A minimal end-to-end example (condensed from crates/goose-roaming/examples/echo_roundtrip.rs, which runs both ends in one process — cargo run -p goose-roaming --example echo_roundtrip):

use std::sync::Arc;
use goose_roaming::{
    AcpStreamServer, EndpointId, RoamingConfig, RoamingIdentity, RoamingNode,
};

// Your "agent": anything that can serve an authorized byte stream.
struct EchoServer;
impl AcpStreamServer for EchoServer {
    fn serve_stream(
        &self,
        _client: EndpointId,
        recv: Box<dyn futures::io::AsyncRead + Send + Unpin>,
        send: Box<dyn futures::io::AsyncWrite + Send + Unpin>,
    ) -> futures::future::BoxFuture<'static, anyhow::Result<()>> {
        Box::pin(async move { /* echo recv back on send … */ Ok(()) })
    }
    fn agent_id(&self) -> String { "echo-agent".to_string() }
}

async fn demo() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    // Host: bind a node and share the agent to accepted peers.
    let host = RoamingNode::bind(RoamingConfig::new(RoamingIdentity::generate())).await?;
    host.share(Arc::new(EchoServer)).await?;
    println!("share this card: {}", host.card().encode()?);

    // Client: a separate node dials the host's card.
    let client = RoamingNode::bind(RoamingConfig::new(RoamingIdentity::generate())).await?;

    // Trust step: the HOST must accept the client's key, or the dial is refused.
    host.trust().lock().await.accept(&client.endpoint_id());

    let stream = client.connect(&host.card(), Some("example".into())).await?;
    let (send, recv, _conn) = stream.into_futures_io();
    // … speak your protocol (ACP, or anything) over send/recv …
    Ok(())
}

A few notes for integrators:

• To expose a full goose backend, you don't have to implement AcpStreamServer yourself: goose serve --roam runs goose's regular agent server and exposes it over roam in one process. It works headless, writes its card to <data-dir>/roam/serve.json, and prints it on startup.
• For browser apps, the same transport compiles to WebAssembly. The wasm bindings (@aaif/goose-roam-web, built from the goose-roaming-web crate in the goose-mobile repo) expose a RoamClient to JavaScript — generate an identity, print your card, dial a host's card, and drive ACP from inside a browser tab, with no server in between. The web client below is built on these bindings.
• The crate's README covers the design decisions (why the host controls the working directory, why trust is all-or-nothing, etc.) in more depth.

The web client: a reference browser client

The hosted web client at aaif-goose.github.io/goose-mobile is a reference client built on the pieces above: the @aaif/goose-roam-web wasm bindings for transport, and goose's ui/sdk GooseClient for the ACP protocol layer. The browser tab is itself a roam peer: iroh compiled to WebAssembly runs inside the tab and connects through the same relays with the same mutual key trust — there is no server in between, and no traffic goes through the site's origin. Anything it does, your own app can do with the same bindings.

Pairing works exactly like any other peer. The tab generates its own identity and shows its card; you accept it once on the host:

goose roam peers accept 'goose+roam://…tab…' phone

To get the host's card into the browser, paste it — or run goose roam share --qr and scan the QR code with the web client's camera.

Once connected, the tab can list and open the host's sessions, start new ones, stream responses, steer a running turn, and group sessions by project. You can connect several hosts at once; their sessions appear in one merged list.

The source lives in the goose-mobile repo (mobile-web/) — the README there has build details if you want to host it yourself (it builds to a static site).

Saved peers

Save a peer's card under a nickname so you don't paste cards each time. A saved card is just an address-book entry — it does not let that peer connect to you (use peers accept for that):

goose roam peers add 'goose+roam://…' laptop   # save to the address book
goose roam connect laptop
goose roam delegate laptop "run the tests and report failures"

goose roam peers list      # show saved peers + which keys you accept
goose roam connections     # show observed connections
goose roam id              # print this node's connection card

Controlling who can connect

Access is granted only by accepting a peer's public key — there is no bearer token that works by possession. You accept a peer by saved name or inline card:

goose roam peers accept laptop                    # accept a saved peer
goose roam peers accept 'goose+roam://…'          # accept an inline card (also saves it)
goose roam peers accept 'goose+roam://…' laptop   # accept + save under a nickname in one go

goose roam peers list                             # see who is accepted
goose roam peers revoke laptop                    # stop accepting (name, card, or raw id)

An accepted peer gets goose's full ACP surface — it can drive its own sessions on this machine (new/list/load/prompt), which is effectively remote shell access. There are no finer-grained roles: acceptance is all-or-nothing.

Acceptance is durable and live: it is stored on disk, and a running share re-reads it on each connection and polls the trust file (about every two seconds) to enforce it against connections that are already open. Revoking a peer therefore takes effect within seconds even against a live peer — the share force-closes any of its open connections. No restart on either side.

Because trust is keyed on the peer's public key and the transport authenticates that key cryptographically, a card can be shared over any channel — it is not a secret, and a leaked card lets no one in.

warning

Accepting a peer grants full control — the peer can run the agent's tools, including its shell. Only accept machines and people you trust, and verify the fingerprint out of band.

Letting the agent reach other agents

With the roaming feature enabled, goose can delegate to other agents itself. Ask it to, and it can run goose roam delegate <peer> "<task>" via its shell — for example, "delegate this to my work laptop and summarize what it finds." It sends one self-contained task and relays the response.

Because saved peers are just an address book, the agent can discover what remotes it has available (goose roam peers list) and route work to the right one — e.g. run a build on the machine that has the toolchain, then bring the result back. Each delegation is a self-contained task with a bounded response, so this composes into multi-machine workflows without any shared state.

Notes and limits

• Peers connect directly when NAT hole-punching succeeds and fall back to a relay otherwise. By default roaming uses a set of goose-managed iroh relays (one per region — not iroh's shared public relays); override them with the GOOSE_ROAM_RELAYS config key or environment variable to point at your own deployment.
• connect, delegate, and bridge all accept either a saved peer name or a raw goose+roam://… card. Remember the peer must also have accepted your key.
• A message sent to a session that has a run in flight in the share process becomes a steer of that run. A loop running in a different process on the host (another CLI, or a host that does not have roam enabled) can't be steered remotely — the web client detects this and warns before sending.
• Revoking a peer force-closes its connections within seconds and drops any in-flight turn at its next step; no new work can start. One narrow residual: an OS process a tool had already spawned (say, a long shell command) may run to completion — revocation stops the agent, not processes it already forked.
• On macOS, if a session still appears to hang on connect, set GOOSE_DISABLE_KEYRING=1 to skip the keychain entirely.