The hosted version is the quick way to see what this is. This is the version where the vault sits on your own disk, and the question of who else could read it does not arise — because the answer is nobody, including me.
This is for you if you are comfortable in a terminal, and you would rather trust a file on your laptop than a promise about a server. If neither of those is true, the hosted version is genuinely the better choice, and you can move later.
The vault is a file at ~/.governor/vault.db. Governor binds to
127.0.0.1 — not to your network, not to the internet — so
reaching it already means being on your machine.
On the hosted version, marking a field private stops assistants receiving it, and it is not encrypted against whoever runs the server. Here there is no server and no operator. A private field is readable by software running on your laptop, and by nothing reached over a connection.
Anyone who can reach a port on your machine can already read the database file directly. A password would guard a door in a building with no walls. The moment you expose it — a tunnel, a different bind address — sign-in becomes mandatory and there is no flag to turn it off.
A coding assistant can read the file directly. Claude Code and Cursor have a shell, and a shell can read files. Anything able to run a command on your laptop could already read anything you can; no tool changes that, and one claiming otherwise would be lying. What Governor changes is that writing asks for a person at the keyboard — that is the door that was actually shuttable, and it is shut.
Browser assistants need a tunnel. ChatGPT and Claude in a browser run on somebody else's machine and cannot reach an address on yours. You can put a tunnel in front of it — sign-in is then required — but it stops working when you close the laptop.
Backups are yours. It is one SQLite file, so copying it is the whole job. Nobody else is doing it.
One machine, unless you do the work. Two laptops means two vaults, or your own sync. This is the problem the hosted version exists to solve.
Python 3.11 or newer, a terminal, and about ten minutes. Mac and Linux are covered by an install script; Windows works with three commands by hand.
git clone <the repo> && cd governor ./install.sh
That makes a virtual environment, installs Governor, and writes the connector
config for Claude Code. Then start claude in that folder and ask
it what it knows about you.
The source is not public yet. That is a decision still being made rather than a permanent position, and it is worth saying plainly on a page arguing you should trust software you cannot read.
If you want to run it yourself, ask me and I will give you access to the repository. The full walkthrough, the troubleshooting and the deployment guide are all in there.
See what to try first Or start with the hosted one