---
status: active
initiated: 2026-10-03
touches: [the tool runtime, the catalogue's tool bundles, the controller's declaration composer, settings, own secrets, 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/38-building-the-operators-machine.md]
became: []
---

# 020 — What a bundled tool is given

## What is being investigated

How a module's tools, once they are a bundle the node's runtime loads
([ADR 0175](../../02-DECISIONS/0175-one-tool-runtime-per-node-serves-every-modules-tools-on-the-host-side.md),
[ADR 0188](../../02-DECISIONS/0188-a-modules-own-code-is-bundles-in-any-language-and-a-tools-bundle-speaks-mcp-to-the-runtime.md)),
learn the things their container used to be handed: where the module's configuration file is, where
its token or password is, which port the service listens on, where a provision's address is written.
A container is given these as an environment and mounts, composed by the mesh per module per machine.
A bundle has no environment of its own: the runtime's process carries four words for every bundle it
loads, and nothing per module ([design 38](../../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/38-building-the-operators-machine.md) WP4).

## Why

Two holders moved on 2026-10-03 — the packet filter and the intrusion prevention — and both could,
because neither needs anything but a fixed path and root. Of the thirty-three modules whose tools
still run as containers on the runtime's image, thirty-one are not like that: their environment
names a configuration file, a credential file, a service address, a grants directory. Moving them
one by one without a rule for this would give the mesh thirty-one answers to one question. The
measurement and the options are in [01](01-what-the-containers-are-given.md).

## What it touches

The runtime (which hands a bundle what it is given), the composer (which resolves `${dir:…}` and
`${port:…}` for a container today and would for a bundle), the manifest (where a bundle would say
what it needs), and design 38, which records the gap and must say the rule once there is one.