Configure policies

OpenShell embeds the Egress Gate policy in a network_middlewares entry. The registry validates the complete strict configuration before preparing a pipeline processor.

network_middlewares:
  egress_gate:
    name: Inspect provider requests
    middleware: egress-gate
    order: 0
    config:
      gates:
        - name: identifiers
          kind: regex
          scan:
            kind: body
            action:
              kind: replace
              template: '[{entity}]'
          pattern_catalog: patterns.yaml
      default_decision: allow
    on_error: fail_closed
    endpoints:
      include: [api.anthropic.com]

Relative catalog paths resolve from the Egress Gate process working directory, not from the policy file. Use an inline catalog when the process does not have a stable working directory.

The Egress Gate policy has two required fields:

• gates contains one through ten named gate configurations.
• default_decision is allow or deny.

Each gate entry has a unique, bounded name. Its literal kind field selects the exact gate type and its remaining fields. The registry rejects unknown fields, unknown gate types, missing defaults, and duplicate names.

Built-in gates

The shipped registry contains only regex. See Regex gate for scans, actions, catalogs, and replacement templates. scan.kind selects the body, path, query, or named headers. scan.action.kind selects detect or deny; a body scan can also select replace. The schema does not permit replace for another scan kind. A trusted application registry supplies other behavior.

Inspect the installed registry

Run these commands from the projects/egress-gate/ directory in a source checkout:

uv run egress-gate gates list
uv run egress-gate gates schema
uv run egress-gate validate --policy path/to/policy.yaml

Custom registries use the same module attribute for inspection and serving:

uv run egress-gate \
  --registry my_gates:registry gates list
uv run egress-gate \
  --registry my_gates:registry gates schema

The attribute can contain a GateRegistry or a zero-argument factory that returns one. A factory is useful when a deployment must construct typed GateResources dynamically. Policy configuration cannot import Python, choose a resource implementation, or provide credentials.

validate checks the policy and registered resources. It also reads and checks a file-backed pattern catalog. It does not construct gates, prepare a pipeline processor, or change the active policy. Use evaluate to check artifacts that the gate creates during preparation. The gRPC service checks the exact encoded size of the OpenShell configuration.

For repeatable request-level checks, the evaluate command accepts a pipeline policy and a strict version-one corpus. It uses the registry's prepared pipeline processor path and does not start the gRPC service. See Test policies offline.