Board

Board is the desktop console. One window over the same apps the toryo command line drives: the job queue, sequence runs, schedules, the knowledge plane, your projects and your settings, watched live instead of polled from a terminal.

It is a view onto your install rather than a second copy of it. Every screen drives the same toryo commands you would run yourself, against the same database and the same background services, so a job you queue from a terminal shows up on the Dispatch screen, and a setting you change here is the same setting the CLI reads.

What you downloaded#

One file carries both halves of the product. The dmg on the downloads page holds the console and the whole toryo CLI, bundled inside the app. There is one build per Mac architecture, so pick Apple Silicon or Intel to match yours. Open the dmg, drag Toryo to Applications, and launch it. The build is signed and notarized, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning.

Linux gets the same app as a deb, an rpm or an AppImage; see Getting started.

That one download is all of toryo's own software. Getting started walks the full install, including the host prerequisites and the tools setup offers to install for you.

First launch#

Board opens two gates before it shows you a screen, in this order.

The install. A freshly dragged app has the CLI in its own resources and nothing on disk yet, so board asks setup for every question it would put to you and shows them on one screen, grouped as Database, Ollama, Host tools, Agent harnesses and Integrations. An offer this machine cannot take is shown disabled with setup's reason beside it. The database runtime defaults to Docker when Docker is already running, and to embedded pglite otherwise.

Pressing Install and set up runs toryo setup with your answers and streams its log. When it exits, board shows what actually happened before letting you in: Toryo is set up, or Setup finished with problems with each failed item and the command to finish it by hand. A step setup cannot take for you, such as signing in to GitHub with gh auth login, is listed under Next steps with a button that opens a terminal running it. Continue moves on.

Activation. Once the install is provisioned, board reads the license. If this install was never activated, its trial has ended, or its license is blocked, board raises the activation dialog as an overlay that cannot be dismissed until it has a working license. The background services are held down by the same check, so there is nothing running behind the overlay anyway.

On Windows, board's CLI and services run inside WSL2. The first launch walks you through installing WSL, restarting Windows if it has to, and installing and configuring Ubuntu-24.04, then shows the same setup questions. When that finishes, press Restart Toryo: the window cannot see the backend it just installed until it relaunches. See Windows.

Activating from board#

The dialog takes the same two credentials the CLI does. An email address on its own starts a 14-day trial. An email address plus a license key activates a seat. Either one activates the whole install, not board alone.

Everything else, what a trial covers, what a seat covers, and how activation survives a lost connection, is on Licensing & activation.

Where the license lives afterwards#

The license entry is pinned to the foot of the sidebar, labelled with the email address you are signed in as. On a trial it carries the countdown as a second line, read from your own install rather than fetched, so it stays accurate offline. Clicking it opens the same dialog the boot gate raises, which is where you enter a key once a trial runs out.

Help and a first run#

The Help button is always in the header. It links to reference material and can reopen the guided-path chooser. A chosen guide stays in a dock while you move between screens, marks completed steps from live state, and can be switched or dismissed without losing access to it.

For a first useful run, choose a guide, create or select a project, then launch the suggested task. Board exposes agent and model selectors where work is created, so the run does not have to use the default harness.

The screens#

Board's sidebar holds fourteen screens in three sections:

• Orchestration: Foreman, Scheduler, Dispatch, Sequence.
• Knowledge: Brain, Memory, Library, Code Index, Ideas.
• System: Sequence Design, Projects, Messaging, Usage, Settings.

Each has its own concept page here, and those pages carry the detail: what a screen is for is explained once, on the page named after it.

The task-oriented highlights are:

• Foreman separates unhealthy services from optional unavailable services, and shows stale-code and queued-restart badges without calling either health. It also flags the foreman watch supervisor when it is running changed code: the status strip shows supervisor: stale code and the header pill reads Supervisor stale, which offers a confirmed Restart. While foreman is bringing the stack up or restarting it, the header says starting or restarting rather than counting services as down, and the lifecycle buttons wait until it finishes.
• Sequence lets you edit eligible run inputs, re-pin a run to current sequence definitions, archive and restore runs, and answer approval gates or live worker questions without leaving Board. A parked run's step timeline says what the gate is waiting on, with the gate's findings underneath, and an acceptance step shows a per-command acceptance: summary over the verbatim evidence, opened automatically when a check did not pass. A step that keeps failing the same way parks its run with a Retry (force) panel showing the failure. Retrying re-dispatches the step unchanged, so fix the cause first; Cancel run gives up.
• Dispatch shows a Claude worker's subagents inside its live feed, each as a subagent span with its tool calls nested under it, so a busy subagent is distinguishable from a stuck worker. A queued job's detail offers Force start, and Start despite conflict when another worktree holds the files it wants. A Queue paused banner shows while admission is paused.
• Projects sets how an existing project is verified: how often a code-task run executes the full test suite (never, before-review, every-verify, or ci with a named CI check), the test and install commands as Detect, None or Custom, the test timeout, and the sensitive-path list. It is also where you share a project with your team and connect a checkout to one a teammate shared; see Team projects.
• Library can export a finding for use elsewhere.
• Ideas shows scoring and source verification so you can judge what is ready to promote.

Sequence Design is where you create, clone, edit and import sequences, including by describing what you want to an agent rather than writing YAML. Usage is the rate-limit picture for every harness you have enabled.

Updating#

Open the license dialog from the sidebar and press Check for updates, or click the release notice when it appears in the bell. Board downloads the new version, installs it and relaunches; the command-line tools follow on that next launch, from the payload the new app carries.

On an Apple Silicon Mac, that is. The in-app updater ships one payload, for that architecture, so an Intel install finds nothing to download and keeps reporting that it is up to date. Update it by downloading the dmg again from the downloads page and replacing the app in Applications.

Nothing is ever applied without you. No update on quit, no timer, no silent download. Updating restarts the background services, which ends every agent session and dispatch job in flight, so the Update button stays disabled while anything is running and tells you what: "2 dispatch jobs running, 1 sequence run active". Re-check asks again once you have let them finish.

toryo update is the same decision from a terminal. It swaps the CLI binaries in ~/.toryo/bin and refuses a busy machine the same way, naming what it would interrupt. --force overrides it, and toryo update --quiescence asks the question without applying anything.

You can still download Toryo.dmg again and replace the app by hand. Nothing about the in-app path stops that.

Where things go wrong#

If the header reads starting: or restarting:, foreman is still bringing services up; wait for it rather than pressing restart.

• Screens are empty or red. Usually the background services are down rather than board being broken. The Foreman screen names which one, and toryo foreman check reports the same thing from a terminal.
• The activation overlay is back. The license state changed under you: a trial ended, a seat was revoked, or the cached proof no longer verifies. Licensing & activation covers each case.

Full command surface: CLI & contract reference.