Enable guardrail templates

Turn on starter guardrail packs from the Apie dashboard via the CLI.

Apie ships starter guardrail templates — pre-built policies for common production risks like secret access, production deploys, and destructive shell commands. Enable them with a single CLI command before switching to Enforce mode.

When you finish this page, guardrail templates will be active for your agent in the dashboard.

Enable a template

TypeScript

npx apie guardrails enable prod-secrets
npx apie guardrails enable prod-deploys

You can also enable templates programmatically:

TypeScript

await apie.enableGuardrailTemplate("prod-secrets");

Starter packs

These templates match common risky action patterns. Exact keys depend on your Apie workspace — check the dashboard for available templates.

Template key	Typically guards
prod-secrets	Secret and vault reads in production
prod-deploys	Deployment and release executions
prod-database	Database writes and schema changes
prod-shell	Destructive shell commands (rm -rf, etc.)
prod-merge	Production branch merges

Test templates in monitor mode

Before enforcing, exercise templates in monitor mode to see which decisions they produce:

npx apie send-test-event --mode pipeline

Or run the Guardrail packs recipe which exercises deploy, vault, database, merge, and shell scenarios.

What you’ll see

agent.guardrail.evaluated events showing which templates matched and what decision they returned (allow, warn, block, require_approval).

Workflow

1. Enable templates via CLI
2. Run in monitor mode and review evaluations
3. Declare capabilities so templates have accurate context
4. Switch to Enforce mode

Next steps

Enforce guardrails

Block actions that templates flag.

Guardrail packs recipe

Walk through all five smoke scenarios.