From one short name to a shared wiki and your first agents, in a few minutes. Add a specialist per department as you go. Everything is created on your machine, and ecosystems are included on every plan.

Invited to a team? Use Join an ecosystem with your invite instead.

Before you start

• ACTower installed. See Getting Started.
• git: each role repo starts as a git repo with a first commit.
• tmux and an AI CLI for Start workspace: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or Google Antigravity CLI (beta).
• Obsidian (optional, free) to read the wiki in step 8.

1. Name it

Open Ecosystems and click Create ecosystem. Type a short name, for example acme.

As you type, ACTower shows what a name-only create builds: the hub (acme-ecosystem), the workspace folder (~/workspaces/acme by default; change it under Customize), and five department role repos (devtools, product, sales, marketing and admin), plus a profile for you, the owner.

The five departments are only a starting point. Customize sets it up front instead:

• Departments: remove any of the five, rename them, add your own with Add department, or take the offered strategy and support. For each one, Create repo makes a new role repo and Link existing uses a repo you already have.
• App repos: add your code repos.

You add specialists after create (step 4), and you can change all of it later with Add repo (step 5). Already have a hub-shaped workspace? Adopt existing, on the same screen, registers it instead of making a new one.

2. Preview, then create

Preview lists every change as a dry run, each folder, link and file, with a count (for example "77 changes to apply"). Nothing has been created yet at that point. Choose Create ecosystem, and ACTower applies the plan and checks every step: "acme-ecosystem is live".

3. What you get

• Five role repos, one per department, each a git repo on this machine with its own docs folder. No remote yet; you put them on GitHub when you invite your team.
• The hub: links to every role repo's docs, agents, skills and commands, plus the files ACTower writes for you: CLAUDE.md with the reference-first rules, SOURCE_MAP.md, a Dashboard and an Obsidian setup.
• Two starter agents in devtools: an orchestrator for cross-repo work and a todo-specialist.
• Your code repos, if you added them under Customize.

4. Give each department a specialist

The ecosystem shows a note for each department with no agent yet, for example "product has a role repo but no specialist yet". Add from template fills in the Add agent form for you: the agent's name, what it covers, and its repo. The result is a starting structure with placeholders, so fill in its domain (what it knows and decides) before you add it. The new agent gets its own docs folder in that role repo, with a reference folder from the first minute: the home for what it learns. If the workspace is already running, press Start workspace again to give the new agent its own window.

5. Add your code

Add repo brings in more repos. Choose the kind: a role repo (a department, linked into the hub) or an app repo (your code, which your agents work in and which is not linked into the hub). Then choose where it comes from: Create new, Use a repo I already have on this computer (with its history), or From GitHub (after you connect GitHub).

6. Start the workspace

Start workspace shows what it will run, window by window, before anything starts. Tick Also launch agents and pick your AI CLI, then start. Claude Code loads each specialist; other CLIs start plain in each agent's window. ACTower opens acme-agents in tmux, with one window per specialist at the hub, and, if you added code repos, acme-workspace with a window for each.

7. Watch and answer

Every agent shows up in Monitor. Safe steps are approved for you; risky ones wait in the Responder. On the Free plan, Monitor watches your five most active agents. See Monitor and Responder.

8. Open the wiki

Open in Obsidian opens the hub as a vault, starting at the Dashboard. The first time, Obsidian asks whether to trust the vault's plugins; say yes, or the Dashboard's tables stay empty. Start workspace also starts vault-sync, a small helper that tells Obsidian when an agent writes a doc in a role repo, so the Dashboard updates as they work. After you restart your Mac, press Start workspace again to bring it back.

Keep it current

• A new page in an existing docs folder shows up in the hub right away: docs folders are linked whole.
• Rebuild picks up a new agent, skill, command or docs folder made outside ACTower, by hand or by an agent. Add agent and Add repo update the hub for you. Rebuild previews the plan first.
• Source map shows what the hub links, and flags broken links and strays.
• Deregister removes an ecosystem from ACTower and never deletes files. Delete the folders yourself if you want them gone.

From the terminal

Create the ecosystem in the app. After that, the terminal can do the rest:

actower ecosystem list                                   # your ecosystems
actower ecosystem repo add --kind role|app --path <dir>  # add a repo you already have
actower ecosystem repo open <repo> --cli claude          # start an agent in a repo's folder
actower ecosystem hub --config <yaml> --profile <name> --rebuild --execute   # Rebuild

The exact Rebuild command for your hub, with its config path and profile, is near the top of the hub's CLAUDE.md ("To refresh this hub"). Run actower ecosystem --help for everything on your installed version.

Next: how it all fits together, the CLI and the FAQ: Ecosystems.