#Set up your marsh home

From your Mac, put marsh's dotfiles and agent settings in ~/.marsh/home. Inside marsh, that directory appears as your home (~). Its files survive marsh stop and VM resets.

#Agent settings and skills

Use these paths on your Mac:

Put shell startup files here too: ~/.marsh/home/.bashrc on the Mac is ~/.bashrc inside marsh. See Choosing your shell for startup files and The shell for editor settings.

Jobs share this home, including any saved logins and history. If you keep dotfiles in Git, track the files you choose rather than the entire home.

For example, add an alias and prompt in the marsh shell:

cat >> ~/.bashrc <<'EOF'
alias ll='ls -lah'
PS1='\w \$ '
EOF
source ~/.bashrc
alias ll

#Connect an MCP server

Save connections for one registered command in ~/.marsh/sbxenvs/NAME.yaml. Create the sbxenvs directory if needed. For example, save this as ~/.marsh/sbxenvs/pi.yaml on your Mac:

schemaVersion: "1"
mcp:
  servers:
    - name: granola
      url: https://mcp.granola.ai/mcp

Exit your marsh shells, run marsh stop from your Mac terminal, then start marsh again. The next Pi job loads the connection. If it reports that sign-in is required, run this on your Mac, then retry:

sbx mcp auth granola

To load a connection for every Kit and the shell, put it in ~/.marsh/sbxenv.yaml instead. Shared entries are added to each command's entries; do not repeat the same server in both files.

Loaded servers are shared by jobs in that Kit VM, across projects. Removing an entry stops future automatic loading; it does not remove the server's Docker Sandboxes registration or sign-in. Manage those with sbx mcp on the Mac.

#Local servers

Use command and args instead of url:

schemaVersion: "1"
mcp:
  servers:
    - name: my-reader
      command: /absolute/path/to/my-reader
      args: ["--readonly"]

Local MCP servers run on your Mac with your account's permissions. Keep their executable, scripts, and configuration outside directories that jobs can modify. Use the server's host-side authentication setup; keep keys out of YAML and command arguments.

#Mount a reference directory

Add additionalWorkspaces to the same YAML file. For example, this makes an existing Mac directory available to Pi at /Users/me/reference, read-only:

schemaVersion: "1"
additionalWorkspaces:
  - path: /Users/me/reference
    readOnly: true

Replace the path with your directory's absolute path. YAML paths do not expand ~ or environment variables. Set readOnly: true for files the agent should only read; the default is read-write. You can include both mcp and additionalWorkspaces in one file.

Restart marsh after saving, as above. Child jobs inherit their parent's extra directories. Agents in a split do not receive extra directories.

With a different MARSH_HOME, use its home, sbxenv.yaml, and sbxenvs paths instead. Ephemeral-home sessions skip these additions.

See Configuration for file rules and limits, Troubleshooting for setup errors, and Security for MCP access.