Amber Protocol ships as an installable dsh bundle named dsh-amber-protocol. Installing it with the native profile plugin command adds one declared dsh bundle layer that resolves its own installed location, starts Amber's stdio MCP server, exposes Amber skills through dsh's filesystem skill provider, and governs the workspace at process.cwd() by default.

Amber is discoverable on the official dsh-plugin topic.

Install (recommended)

# Install once; dsh adds the Amber bundle layer to your profile.
# This modifies only dependency and bundle declarations managed by dsh;
# it does NOT write the profile's patch file.
dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-amber-protocol

# Ordinary startup loads Amber after install (no repeated --patch flag).
dsh --profile web

On Windows, default port 3080 is often in a reserved range. If listen fails with EACCES, pass --port 13080.

What you get

MCP tools

The dsh agent gains 10 governed tools under the stable amber server namespace (prefixed mcp__amber__):

amber.governance.report — readiness score, risks, next actions
amber.session.start / status / approve / verify — session lifecycle
amber.context.ingest / amber.object.query — context knowledge lifecycle
amber.route.test — route validation
amber.fn.repoOverview / amber.fn.sessionEvidence — function queries

All mutating operations (session start, approve, context ingest) return approvalRequired: true — dsh must explicitly approve them. Read-only operations execute directly. This is the F018 fail-closed governance seam.

Journey skills

The dsh agent gains 5 skills discoverable through the native skill catalog (4 journeys plus the amber router that dispatches to them):

amber-delivery — objective → plan → session evidence → acceptance
amber-diagnosis-adoption — audit readiness, adopt or repair governance
amber-context-continuity — distill context, verify loadouts, resume
amber-continuous-improvement — select next improvement slice, loop

Bundle structure

File	Purpose
`package.json`	Bundle manifest; declares `dsh.bundle.patch` + `files` contract
`cordis.patch.yml`	Declarative dsh patch layer (runtime, MCP client, skill provider)
`runtime.js`	Path-resolution adapter; exposes `amberBundlePaths` service
`README.md`	This file
`LICENSE`	MIT

The runtime resolves amber-protocol from its own installed module location (require.resolve("amber-protocol/package.json")) and exposes the MCP script and skills directory to later bundle rows. Configuration expressions do not rely on __dirname, require, a hard-coded profile name, or a global install.

Unpublished checkout fallback (overlay)

If you are developing Amber itself and the bundle is not yet published, use the static overlay patches instead. These are not shipped in the bundle files array — they exist only for local development.

Alternative — local tarball install with pnpm overrides: if you want to test the bundle contract (not the overlay) against an unpublished 1.6.0 tarball, dsh plugin add forwards to pnpm. When amber-protocol@1.6.0 is not yet on the registry, add a pnpm overrides entry so the bundle's amber-protocol@^1.6.0 dependency resolves from the local tarball instead of the registry (which still has 1.5.1):

# In the profile's pnpm-workspace.yaml (dsh creates this on first init):
overrides:
  amber-protocol: file:/path/to/amber-protocol-1.6.0.tgz

Then:

dsh plugin --profile web add /path/to/amber-protocol-1.6.0.tgz
dsh plugin --profile web add /path/to/dsh-amber-protocol-1.6.0.tgz

Once 1.6.0 is published, plain dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-amber-protocol works without overrides.

Overlay patches

File	Purpose
`amber-mcp.patch.yml`	Path A — expose Amber governance tools via MCP server
`amber-skills.patch.yml`	Path B — expose Amber journey skills to the dsh agent
`amber-full.patch.yml`	A + B combined in one layer

Prerequisites (overlay only)

dsh installed: npm install -g @deepseek-ai/dsh (or npx @deepseek-ai/dsh)
A dsh profile: dsh --profile web auto-initializes on first use
This checkout: you need a local clone so the patch can point at scripts/amber-mcp.js and skills/
Amber in the target repo (if it is not this checkout): node scripts/amber.js init --target <repo>

Overlay usage

Edit amber-full.patch.yml first: replace /path/to/amber-protocol with this checkout. --target is the repository Amber should govern (it may differ from this checkout).

Recommended — overlay at launch, leave the profile file untouched:

dsh --profile web --patch /path/to/amber-protocol/dsh/amber-full.patch.yml

Alternative — copy into the profile layer (overwrites an empty or existing cordis.patch.yml):

cp dsh/amber-full.patch.yml "$DSH_HOME/profiles/web/cordis.patch.yml"
dsh --profile web

The overlay patches use hardcoded absolute paths. Adjust the two paths in each patch file:

scripts/amber-mcp.js path: point to your amber-protocol checkout
skills path: point to the skills directory under the same checkout
--target path: the repository Amber governs (can differ from the amber-protocol checkout)

HMR

dsh watches cordis.patch.yml for changes. Editing the patch file triggers hot-reload: the MCP client disconnects and reconnects, and skill directories are re-scanned — no restart needed.

Verified

MCP server responds to initialize + tools/list (10 tools)
Read-only tools (governance.report) execute directly (approvalRequired: false)
Mutating tools (session.start) fail-closed (approvalRequired: true, executed: false)
Skills match dsh SKILL.md frontmatter format (5 skills, kebab-case names)
dsh --dump-config composes the bundle layer with zero errors
npm pack --dry-run ships every declared asset (cordis.patch.yml, runtime.js, README.md, LICENSE, package.json)