🤠 The Sheriff

🌵 On the Frontier

Out on The Frontier, not everyone who wanders in is supposed to be there.

Data has value. Work has meaning. And the integrity of the system depends on one simple question:

Are you actually part of The Frontier?

The Sheriff is the one who asks.

Before any work begins—before data is touched, before pipelines run, before claims are made—the Sheriff checks your papers. Why? Well, in a system built on reproducibility and trust, every action must trace back to the same shared ground.

The Sheriff doesn’t much care what you’re building. It doesn’t judge your methods. It only cares that you’re standing inside The Frontier.

No Frontier, no work.

⸻

🛂 System Role

The Sheriff package provides a minimal enforcement layer that verifies whether a user is operating within a valid Frontier environment.

It establishes a simple contract:

A user is considered a Frontier citizen if a valid frontier.yml file can be located.

This validation is performed in two steps:

1. Environment Variable Check The Sheriff looks for a FRONTIER environment variable.
   • If set, it must point to a valid frontier.yml file.
2. Working Directory Check If the environment variable is not set, the Sheriff inspects the current working directory.
   • It verifies that the path includes the configured Frontier directory name (default: frontier)
   • It then checks for the presence of frontier.yml at the expected root location

If either check succeeds:

• The Frontier path is resolved
• The user is validated as a citizen

If both checks fail:

• Validation fails
• Execution should not proceed in Frontier-dependent workflows

This is intentionally minimal.

The Sheriff does not enforce data standards, workflow structure, or code quality. It only establishes that you are (or are not) operating inside a recognized Frontier workspace.

⚙️ Installation & Usage

We recommend installing the Sheriff using uv, "An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust," at the user-level:

# anywhere in the terminal on FASRC
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# verify your installation by running "uvx"
# which means "run this in an ephemeral, temporary environment"
uvx pycowsay 'hello world!'

Install the Sheriff:

uv tool install https://github.com/GoldenPlanetaryHealthLab/sheriff.git

Finally, ask the Sheriff to check your papers:

sheriff