Wanaku — A Governed Action Proxy for AI Agents

Wanaku is a governed action proxy for AI agents. It sits between agents and the systems they act on, intercepting tool calls, agent-to-agent messages, and inference traffic. Integration developers build Apache Camel routes and publish them as tools; agents call those tools with parameters, but Wanaku runs the actual work — the agent never touches backend systems directly. Policy, identity, data controls, and audit happen in the proxy, not in the agent.

The project name comes from the origins of the word Guanaco, a camelid native to South America.

Key Features

• Agent Isolation — Agents call tools through Wanaku; they never reach backend systems directly

• Policy Enforcement — LLM-powered evaluators + WASM action scripts classify, filter, and block tool calls in the proxy layer

• Identity & Auth — Authentication and authorization via oauth2-proxy and Keycloak, enforced before actions reach backends

• Tool Discovery — Auto-discover tools from upstream MCP servers; integration developers publish Camel routes as tools

• Namespace Isolation — Organize tools and resources across isolated namespaces per team, tenant, or environment

• Extensible Architecture — Plugin system via feature crates and a composable filter pipeline

• Admin Dashboard — Web UI for managing tools, resources, prompts, and forwards

• Container-Ready — Multi-arch images (x86_64, aarch64) published automatically

Related MCP server: LocalMCP

Quick Start

Install

Download the latest early-access build on Linux or macOS:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wanaku-ai/wanaku/main/get-wanaku.sh | bash

The installer detects the host platform, verifies the release checksum, and installs wanaku-server into $HOME/bin. Override the destination with WANAKU_INSTALL_DIR.

Container

podman run -p 8080:8080 -p 8081:8081 quay.io/wanaku/wanaku-server

To preload forwards, mount a wanaku.yaml:

podman run -p 8080:8080 -p 8081:8081 \
  -v ./wanaku.yaml:/etc/wanaku/wanaku.yaml \
  quay.io/wanaku/wanaku-server \
  --wanaku-config /etc/wanaku/wanaku.yaml

From Source

cargo build
cargo run

The first cargo build automatically builds the admin UI via yarn if ui/admin/dist/ is missing.

Endpoints

Learn Wanaku

The easiest way to learn Wanaku is by following the guided tutorial.

The reference documentation, including the complete installation and configuration instructions, is available in the usage guide.

Configuration

Drop a wanaku.yaml in the working directory to preload forward definitions:

forwards:
  - name: "upstream-mcp"
    address: "http://remote.example.com/mcp"

If no config file is provided, the server starts with an empty registry that can be populated via the management API.

Management API Examples

Register a remote MCP server as a forward (its tools are auto-discovered):

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/forwards \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "upstream-mcp",
    "address": "http://remote.example.com/mcp"
  }'

Refresh tools from the forward (auto-discover):

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/forwards/upstream-mcp/refreshes

All tools from the remote server now appear in your local catalog. The client has no idea they're forwarded.

Authentication

Authentication is handled externally by oauth2-proxy. Two instances sit in front of the MCP and management ports, sharing an SSO cookie:

• MCP proxy (:4180 → :8081) — protects MCP endpoints, any authenticated user

• Management proxy (:4181 → :8080) — protects the admin UI and REST API, admin role required

Wanaku also serves RFC 9728 OAuth Protected Resource Metadata at /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/{namespace}/mcp. Set WANAKU_AUTH_ISSUER to your Keycloak realm URL to populate the authorization_servers field.

See deploy/auth/README.md for setup instructions (Docker Compose and local development).

Documentation

The Wanaku Documentation website contains the full project documentation.

Contributors working on the project may want to refer to the development documentation:

• Getting Started - Development setup guide

• Architecture - System architecture and components

• Configuration - Environment variables and configuration reference

• Management API - API reference

• Admin UI - Admin dashboard development

• Features / Plugins - Feature crate system

• Plugin Development - Guide for writing new feature crates

• Evaluator Engine - WASM-based evaluator

• Action Policies - Deterministic MCP action rules

• Governance Posture - Enforcement modes and fail-safe behavior

• Contributing - Contribution guidelines

• Security - Security policy

Community

• GitHub Issues - Bug reports and feature requests

• Discussions - Ask questions and share ideas

• Examples - Example capabilities and integrations

Related Projects

• Camel Integration Capability — Build Apache Camel routes and publish them as tools that agents can call through Wanaku

• Java SDK — SDK for building capability services in Java

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details.