On a high-level, we try to design `config.toml` so that you don't have
to "comment out a lot of stuff" when testing different options.
Previously, defining a sandbox policy was somewhat at odds with this
principle because you would define the policy as attributes of
`[sandbox]` like so:
```toml
[sandbox]
mode = "workspace-write"
writable_roots = [ "/tmp" ]
```
but if you wanted to temporarily change to a read-only sandbox, you
might feel compelled to modify your file to be:
```toml
[sandbox]
mode = "read-only"
# mode = "workspace-write"
# writable_roots = [ "/tmp" ]
```
Technically, commenting out `writable_roots` would not be strictly
necessary, as `mode = "read-only"` would ignore `writable_roots`, but
it's still a reasonable thing to do to keep things tidy.
Currently, the various values for `mode` do not support that many
attributes, so this is not that hard to maintain, but one could imagine
this becoming more complex in the future.
In this PR, we change Codex CLI so that it no longer recognizes
`[sandbox]`. Instead, it introduces a top-level option, `sandbox_mode`,
and `[sandbox_workspace_write]` is used to further configure the sandbox
when when `sandbox_mode = "workspace-write"` is used:
```toml
sandbox_mode = "workspace-write"
[sandbox_workspace_write]
writable_roots = [ "/tmp" ]
```
This feels a bit more future-proof in that it is less tedious to
configure different sandboxes:
```toml
sandbox_mode = "workspace-write"
[sandbox_read_only]
# read-only options here...
[sandbox_workspace_write]
writable_roots = [ "/tmp" ]
[sandbox_danger_full_access]
# danger-full-access options here...
```
In this scheme, you never need to comment out the configuration for an
individual sandbox type: you only need to redefine `sandbox_mode`.
Relatedly, previous to this change, a user had to do `-c
sandbox.mode=read-only` to change the mode on the command line. With
this change, things are arguably a bit cleaner because the equivalent
option is `-c sandbox_mode=read-only` (and now `-c
sandbox_workspace_write=...` can be set separately).
Though more importantly, we introduce the `-s/--sandbox` option to the
CLI, which maps directly to `sandbox_mode` in `config.toml`, making
config override behavior easier to reason about. Moreover, as you can
see in the updates to the various Markdown files, it is much easier to
explain how to configure sandboxing when things like `--sandbox
read-only` can be used as an example.
Relatedly, this cleanup also made it straightforward to add support for
a `sandbox` option for Codex when used as an MCP server (see the changes
to `mcp-server/src/codex_tool_config.rs`).
Fixes https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/1248.
This is a major redesign of how sandbox configuration works and aims to
fix https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/1248. Specifically, it
replaces `sandbox_permissions` in `config.toml` (and the
`-s`/`--sandbox-permission` CLI flags) with a "table" with effectively
three variants:
```toml
# Safest option: full disk is read-only, but writes and network access are disallowed.
[sandbox]
mode = "read-only"
# The cwd of the Codex task is writable, as well as $TMPDIR on macOS.
# writable_roots can be used to specify additional writable folders.
[sandbox]
mode = "workspace-write"
writable_roots = [] # Optional, defaults to the empty list.
network_access = false # Optional, defaults to false.
# Disable sandboxing: use at your own risk!!!
[sandbox]
mode = "danger-full-access"
```
This should make sandboxing easier to reason about. While we have
dropped support for `-s`, the way it works now is:
- no flags => `read-only`
- `--full-auto` => `workspace-write`
- currently, there is no way to specify `danger-full-access` via a CLI
flag, but we will revisit that as part of
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/1254
Outstanding issue:
- As noted in the `TODO` on `SandboxPolicy::is_unrestricted()`, we are
still conflating sandbox preferences with approval preferences in that
case, which needs to be cleaned up.
This PR introduces support for `-c`/`--config` so users can override
individual config values on the command line using `--config
name=value`. Example:
```
codex --config model=o4-mini
```
Making it possible to set arbitrary config values on the command line
results in a more flexible configuration scheme and makes it easier to
provide single-line examples that can be copy-pasted from documentation.
Effectively, it means there are four levels of configuration for some
values:
- Default value (e.g., `model` currently defaults to `o4-mini`)
- Value in `config.toml` (e.g., user could override the default to be
`model = "o3"` in their `config.toml`)
- Specifying `-c` or `--config` to override `model` (e.g., user can
include `-c model=o3` in their list of args to Codex)
- If available, a config-specific flag can be used, which takes
precedence over `-c` (e.g., user can specify `--model o3` in their list
of args to Codex)
Now that it is possible to specify anything that could be configured in
`config.toml` on the command line using `-c`, we do not need to have a
custom flag for every possible config option (which can clutter the
output of `--help`). To that end, as part of this PR, we drop support
for the `--disable-response-storage` flag, as users can now specify `-c
disable_response_storage=true` to get the equivalent functionality.
Under the hood, this works by loading the `config.toml` into a
`toml::Value`. Then for each `key=value`, we create a small synthetic
TOML file with `value` so that we can run the TOML parser to get the
equivalent `toml::Value`. We then parse `key` to determine the point in
the original `toml::Value` to do the insert/replace. Once all of the
overrides from `-c` args have been applied, the `toml::Value` is
deserialized into a `ConfigToml` and then the `ConfigOverrides` are
applied, as before.
I started this PR because I wanted to share the `format_duration()`
utility function in `codex-rs/exec/src/event_processor.rs` with the TUI.
The question was: where to put it?
`core` should have as few dependencies as possible, so moving it there
would introduce a dependency on `chrono`, which seemed undesirable.
`core` already had this `cli` feature to deal with a similar situation
around sharing common utility functions, so I decided to:
* make `core` feature-free
* introduce `common`
* `common` can have as many "special interest" features as it needs,
each of which can declare their own deps
* the first two features of common are `cli` and `elapsed`
In practice, this meant updating a number of `Cargo.toml` files,
replacing this line:
```toml
codex-core = { path = "../core", features = ["cli"] }
```
with these:
```toml
codex-core = { path = "../core" }
codex-common = { path = "../common", features = ["cli"] }
```
Moving `format_duration()` into its own file gave it some "breathing
room" to add a unit test, so I had Codex generate some tests and new
support for durations over 1 minute.
Michael Bolin ·