Armorial

Armorial is a local-first, design-system-aware icon workbench and deterministic service for humans and AI Agents. It retrieves existing IconPark geometry, applies one executable project policy, and returns the same approved asset through a web UI, library, CLI, or MCP server.

It does not ask a model to draw SVG. It also does not pretend arbitrary filled icon libraries can be normalized by changing stroke-width.

What is working

• Validated local index over all 2,658 icons in @icon-park/svg@1.4.2.

• English and Simplified Chinese search across names, titles, categories, tags, plurals, and compact UI aliases.

• Project policy for theme, size, stroke width, cap, join, colors, per-surface overrides, and semantic icon selections.

• Explicit ambiguity when equal semantic candidates are not pinned by policy.

• Deterministic SVG, including stable internal clip-path ids, exact per-icon viewBox, byte count, hash, license, capability, and executable-policy compliance fields.

• Standalone visual workbench with browse/search, preview, Copy SVG, download, and standards-based outward drag.

• Optional MCP App picker with explicit Attach and Select & continue actions; ordinary human use never requires an Agent.

• Five model-facing MCP tools: resolve_icon, search_icons, get_icon, get_icons, and the explicit visual-decision route choose_icon.

• One app-only browse_icons helper, excluded from model use by MCP App visibility metadata; enforcement is host-side.

• CLI equivalents for human inspection and shell composition.

• Strict input/output schemas, bounded queries and batches, safe color grammar, bounded SVG/response sizes, and per-item batch failures.

• A deterministic, bounded icon_selection decision format for copy-to-chat and connected continuation. It contains no raw SVG or arbitrary instructions.

The product model records the user flows and one-call Agent route budget. The review contract records the current adversarial sequences.

Related MCP server: brain-mcp-icon-visual

Install and verify

npm install
npm run check

npm run check runs type checks, negative/core/CLI/MCP tests, policy-schema drift detection, the production build, and a fresh-process probe of the built CLI and stdio MCP server.

Run the browser regression lane separately after installing the Playwright-managed Chromium version declared by this project:

npx playwright install chromium
npm run ui:e2e

npm run ui:e2e rebuilds the Node server, standalone UI, and MCP App resource before launching the browser, so it never validates stale dist output.

Visual workbench

Build and launch the loopback-only local UI:

npm run build
npm run start:ui

Open http://127.0.0.1:4178. Search or browse, select one icon, then:

• Copy SVG copies raw SVG for direct use in any editor that accepts it.

• Download saves an .svg file.

• drag an icon cell outward; the app supplies image/svg+xml, plain SVG text, and a download transfer. Whether a destination accepts a browser drag is controlled by that destination, so copy and download are the guaranteed carriers.

• Copy for Agent copies a compact [icon-selection:v1] decision, not the SVG. Paste it into an Agent conversation to preserve the exact id and policy-rendered asset hash.

The right inspector reports the effective project policy. It is intentionally not a second policy editor: a human and Agent must be able to reproduce the same selected asset.

CLI

# Compact candidate list
node dist/adapters/cli.js search settings --limit 5

# Structured resolution using the example project policy
node dist/adapters/cli.js resolve 设置 \
  --policy icon-policy.example.json \
  --context toolbar

# Pure SVG on stdout
node dist/adapters/cli.js get icon-park:search --format svg

# Validate a project policy
node dist/adapters/cli.js policy validate icon-policy.example.json

The CLI never writes SVG files. Pipe or redirect stdout when a human deliberately chooses a destination. The CLI resolves its policy the same way as the MCP server: --policy, then ICON_SVG_SELECT_POLICY, then ./icon-policy.json in the working directory, then the built-in default.

MCP

Build first, then configure an MCP client to launch:

node /absolute/path/to/armorial/dist/adapters/mcp.js \
  --policy /absolute/path/to/project/icon-policy.json

The policy is a server-operator startup decision, never a tool input. When no --policy argument is given, the server resolves one policy file at startup, in this order:

1. the ICON_SVG_SELECT_POLICY environment variable (absolute or working-directory-relative path), which plugin hosts and shell profiles can inject without changing launch arguments; use an absolute path with the Codex plugin because its declared working directory is the cached plugin root;

2. an icon-policy.json in the server's working directory, which is how a project pins its own design-system policy when the host launches the server from the project root;

3. the built-in default policy.

MCP tools do not accept paths, URLs, raw SVG, or source code.

The dominant Agent request should take one call:

resolve_icon({ intent: "settings", context: "toolbar" })

If policy has pinned that semantic intent, the result includes the chosen id and rendered SVG. If several candidates have the same basis, the result is ambiguous and lists candidates without producing geometry.

When the human explicitly asks to compare visually or rejects an earlier choice, use:

choose_icon({ intent: "notification", requestId: "optional-correlation" })

An MCP Apps-capable host opens the same picker. Grid clicks only change the local preview. Attach to conversation updates future model context; Select & continue sends the typed decision as an explicit user message. Hosts without MCP Apps continue to use the four direct tools and the standalone UI/copy fallback.

The repository root is also a Codex plugin bundle: plugin.json, .mcp.json, and the thin descriptive product Skill all route to the same built server. Published tarballs are self-contained: npm pack runs prepack and ships the built dist/ (source maps excluded), so hosts that install npm packages without running lifecycle scripts start the entry points directly.

For local host testing, run npm run plugin:check. It assembles the ignored plugins/armorial/ directory from the exact npm pack contents, installs production dependencies from package-lock.json without lifecycle scripts, gives the staged manifest a fresh local Codex cachebuster, and probes the isolated MCP entry with a project policy. .agents/plugins/marketplace.json points at that generated directory, so a fresh clone must run this command before adding the local marketplace. The staging swap rejects symlink ancestors and does not expose a half-written plugin. The result contains no sources, tests, dev dependencies, package lock, or Git data. After changing the plugin, re-run the command, reinstall, and start a new Codex session so the cached copy updates. For public distribution after npm publish, switch the marketplace entry to an npm source:

"source": {
  "source": "npm",
  "package": "armorial",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "registry": "https://registry.npmjs.org"
}

Policy

Start from icon-policy.example.json. selections is the project-owned semantic decision layer:

{
  "selections": {
    "settings": "icon-park:setting-two",
    "设置": "icon-park:setting-two"
  }
}

The structural schema is icon-policy.schema.json and is generated from the runtime Zod model. Unknown fields are rejected. policy validate additionally checks semantic-key normalization collisions and whether selected icon ids exist in the pinned provider.

size and strokeWidth are final rendered CSS-pixel values. The provider converts that visible stroke width into the source viewBox units before asking IconPark to render, so a 2 remains a 2px stroke at either 20px or 24px output size.

Architecture

Standalone UI ─┐
CLI ───────────┼── adapters ── IconKernel ── validated search index ── @icon-park/svg
MCP tools ─────┤                    │
MCP App UI ────┘                    ├── policy + semantic selections
                                    ├── ambiguity and stable errors
                                    └── deterministic, sanitized SVG result

There is deliberately no cloud account, shared lastSelection, policy editor, fallback collection, or Figma-only product fork. A future Figma adapter should consume the same SVG and selection contracts rather than recreate their rules.

Licenses

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0; see LICENSE and NOTICE. IconPark code and assets remain under Apache-2.0; rendered results identify that license.