Providers

rootle doesn't talk to GitHub directly — it talks to one seam (trait Provider). The github backend ships in-tree; anything else wraps in as a child process speaking NDJSON-RPC over stdio — the same model as LSP. Your adapter can be any language; four methods make a minimal useful provider.

Point rootle at your backend

# ~/.config/rootle/config.toml
[provider]
kind = "stdio"
command = ["python3", "/path/to/fs_provider.py", "/path/to/code"]

Misconfiguration never blocks startup — a failed spawn or bad handshake falls back to GitHub with a warning on the status line.

Try it against a directory of local repos with the reference adapter:

python3 examples/providers/fs_provider.py ~/code   # serves ~/code/* under "local"

The shape of a provider

One JSON message per line on stdin/stdout. An initialize handshake, then calls like repo/tree and repo/blob:

→ {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"repo/tree","params":{"repo":"local/alpha"}}
← {"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":{"entries":[…],"truncated":false,"branch":"main"}}

Building one

• Full wire spec — every method, error kinds, cancellation: doc/provider-protocol.md
• Reference adapter (documentation-by-example): examples/providers/fs_provider.py
• Scaffolding skill — capability questionnaire, adapter skeleton, and a conformance test suite that gates integration: skills/rootle-provider

The e2e suite drives the full TUI through this protocol against the reference adapter — offline proof of the whole path.