Ralph workflow provides fastest way to scaffolds isolated ralph project. Provides everything you need to run Ralph safely inside a VS Code Dev Container with isolated GitHub credentials.

Read the documentation.

🔄 Ralph is an autonomous AI coding agent loop based on https://ghuntley.com/ralph/

This is really suitable for exploratory projects provide it with directions and requirements, leave it AFK, and it develops for you.

npx ralph-workflow

Why isolation matters

Ralph runs with --dangerously-skip-permissions. Without isolation, it operates with your full host credentials — meaning it could access every private repo, cloud account, or service your machine can reach. The Dev Container setup prevents this by:

• Blanking out VS Code's credential-forwarding environment variables (GIT_ASKPASS, VSCODE_GIT_*, SSH_AUTH_SOCK, GITHUB_TOKEN, etc.)
• Disabling VS Code's git auth helpers inside the container
• Mounting only a single-repo fine-grained PAT, not your host keychain

What it does

Running the CLI will:

1. Optionally set up a VS Code Dev Container — picks a base image (Node, Python, etc.) and applies credential-isolation settings so the host's SSH keys, GitHub tokens, and cloud credentials are not forwarded into the container.
2. Optionally create a scoped GitHub PAT — walks you through generating a fine-grained token restricted to just this repository. The token is stored in .ralph/token inside your project (automatically gitignored, mode 0600) and reaches the container through the workspace bind — works on macOS, Linux, and Windows. GitHub setup is independent of the Dev Container choice; you can opt into either, both, or neither.
3. Auto-install RTK — RTK is installed into every Dev Container and rtk init is run for the CLI you picked (claude, codex, gemini, or opencode) so token-reduction kicks in on first boot.
4. Optionally install Claude-only extras — when the selected CLI is claude, you can opt in to the Caveman debugging plugin and the awesome-claude-code-subagents collection. Both default to off and persist in a project-scoped .claude volume across rebuilds.
5. Scaffold Ralph scripts into scripts/ralph/ — the loop script, prompt template, task list, and progress log. If scripts/ already exists, you'll be asked to confirm before anything is overwritten.

Get Involved

We welcome issues and pull requests!

• Participate in GitHub discussions
• Chat with the community on Discord
• See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup instructions

Contributors

Honestly, we all need to learn from Ralph. It may be clueless, but it is very persistent.