Fleet membership

A fleet is a set of trusted members that replicate one claim history. For a runnable setup, follow Connect two machines.

Trust and identities

Each member has a private signing key. A node name and key form an incarnation; a wiped machine that rejoins under the same name is a new incarnation. The anchor is the founding member whose key is pinned by the others.

Members are trusted to write claims and run agents with shell access. A shared fleet secret authenticates traffic; member signatures bind a writer's envelopes to its incarnation. Tailscale or Fabric supplies transport encryption. Never put keys, fleet secrets, or invitation codes in Git, logs, or support reports.

Invitations

fractal fleet invite beacon --via tailscale
fractal fleet invites
fractal fleet join --transports tailscale

Run join on the new machine and enter the code at its no-echo prompt. An invitation expires and admits one member identity. Recovery of a lost response can reuse that same identity until expiry; it does not make the code reusable by a different machine. If the code expires after admission but before recovery, remove the stranded member and issue another invitation.

The sponsor must have a reachable listener. A dial-out-only member cannot sponsor a new joiner. Prefer a prompt or protected code file to passing secrets in command-line arguments.

Verify synchronization

fractal fleet status --json
fractal fleet wait
fractal replication status

Membership alone does not prove catch-up has finished. Wait for the initial sync and inspect the state required by your workflow.

Leaving and removal

fractal fleet leave takes the local machine out after its writes reach another member. fractal fleet remove NAME removes another member; consult --help for required reasons and options.

Removal is not history erasure, secret rotation, or a command to stop all declared agents. A partitioned member may not yet know a removal happened. Preserve the graph and keys when investigating membership disputes.

See replication and checkpoints for the engineering guarantees.