openpasture
Runs virtual fence collars, stores their data, analyses it, and decides where the herd goes.
One Rust server with the web UI built in. The desktop app runs that server for you.
- Collars report positions over HTTP; boundaries go back to them signed, and each collar acks.
- Draw paddocks and boundaries on a satellite map and watch the herd live.
- Collar and fence health, tracks and replay, heatmaps, grazing pressure and rest, an SQL
console, and CSV, GeoJSON and Parquet export.
- A daily grazing decision from Codex or Claude Code (your own sign-in), an API key, or a
built-in heuristic. You approve moves, or let them apply on a timer or at once.
- Strips on a schedule, staged on the collars so they open when the server or signal is away.
- Alerts, approvals and a morning brief by text with your own Twilio number, or by email, a
webhook or push. People and roles: owner, manager, hand, viewer; hands who only text need no
sign-in.
- Grazing records, NRCS 528, organic season, lease head-days and a welfare record, in acres or
hectares.
- An MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT or any agent can run the farm with the same tools.
Download
The desktop app is macOS only for now; the server runs on Linux and macOS. Checksums are in
SHA256SUMS on each release, and what
changed in CHANGELOG.md.
Run the server
mkdir openpasture && cd openpasture
tar xzf ../openpasture-server-linux-x64.tar.gz
./openpasture serve --bind 0.0.0.0 --port 7878
--bind 0.0.0.0 listens on every network the machine is on. Behind a reverse proxy or tunnel,
keep the default 127.0.0.1 instead (see docs/SELF-HOSTING.md).
Open http://<host>:7878. On the machine itself (127.0.0.1) no token is needed. From anywhere
else the app asks for its token once:
./openpasture token
Data lives in OPENPASTURE_DATA_DIR, else the platform data directory; --data-dir DIR
overrides both. It is one SQLite database plus Parquet files, so a copy of the directory is a
backup.
Docker
docker run -d --name openpasture -p 7878:7878 -v openpasture:/data ghcr.io/open-pasture/openpasture
docker exec openpasture openpasture token
The image runs as a non-root user and keeps everything in the /data volume.
For a farm: an https address for collars and phones, systemd, backups and upgrades are in
docs/SELF-HOSTING.md; texting and alerts in docs/TEXTING.md.
Try it with simulated collars
Until you have a collar, collar-sim, the simulator (in the server tarball, or
simulation/collar-sim), speaks the real collar protocol on a farm of its own:
./collar-sim farm
It starts a throwaway server on port 7991 with "Simulated farm", two paddocks and a herd of
twelve simulated collars, and prints the address. Draw a boundary, send it, and watch the acks
come in and the herd walk into it. The app marks every simulated collar "Simulated", reports
leave them out, and the simulator refuses port 7878 and any data dir with real collars. See
simulation/README.md.
Build from source
Needs Rust (rustup installs the version pinned in rust-toolchain.toml) and
bun.
cd ui && bun install && bun run build && cd ..
cargo build --release -p op-cli -p collar-sim # target/release/openpasture, collar-sim (the simulator)
cargo test --workspace
bun run desktop:build # the macOS app, Apple Silicon
bun run desktop:release # universal .app and .dmg
The server embeds ui/dist at build time; if it is missing, the build runs bun for you.
Releases are cut by pushing a tag; see docs/RELEASING.md.
Docs
docs/SELF-HOSTING.md: running it for a farmdocs/TEXTING.md: Twilio, email, webhook, push, the relaydocs/api/: the APIs, by what you're building (HTTP, live feed, MCP,
fleet, and the collar protocol in opencollar)docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: how it's built; docs/PLAN.md:
the original decisionsdocs/RELEASING.md, CONTRIBUTING.md,
SECURITY.md
Licence
The app is AGPL-3.0. op-protocol and op-geo are Apache-2.0, so collar firmware
and other software can use the protocol and geometry without the AGPL. See NOTICE;
every release lists the third-party code it ships, with licences, in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.
Found a security problem? Report it privately: SECURITY.md.
