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Welcome. This is the hands-on path into TOVIO — you will learn it by doing, one short follow-along tutorial at a time. By the end you will have made your first repository, branched and landed work, undone something you thought was gone, and watched a secret stay encrypted even after a full clone.

TOVIO is a version control system built to replace Git. If you know Git, almost everything here will feel familiar — with a few deliberate differences that the concepts section explains in depth. These tutorials assume nothing; just follow along at your own terminal.

What you can run today

TOVIO ships in phases, and a lot already runs. The offline core — init, status, commit, log, diff, lane, switch, land, health, undo, redo, plus git import and quickstart — runs now, and so do the encryption/permission layer (policies, access, encrypt-at-snapshot), networked sync (clone, sync, push, pull over TLS), and the CLI agent control plane (capability tokens, commit --token, provenance, the agent commands), plus the Node SDK/bindings and MCP server. Forge production binaries passed the distinct-Docker-host exercise under a real operator CA. The release artifacts and package channels are not generally available, broader Phase 5 evidence remains open, and the TypeScript edge packages are unpublished. Do not treat the source tree as a supported commercial release.

The path

Work through these in order the first time. Each one stands on the one before it.

  • 1 · Install TOVIO

    Download a published build when one exists, or build the tovio binary from source, and put it on your PATH. Five minutes, all platforms.

    Install

  • 2 · Quickstart

    Your first repository in under a minute: init, edit, commit, log — no keys, no ceremony.

    Quickstart

  • 3 · A solo project, end to end

    Lane, switch, land work onto main, then undo a retained local op-log mutation. This is the fearlessness moment, within the documented undo boundary.

    Solo tutorial

  • 4 · Protect a secret ★

    Declare a policy, commit a secret, and prove it stays encrypted to anyone without clearance — even with the whole repo cloned. The tutorial that shows what TOVIO is for.

    Protect a secret

  • 5 · Collaborate with a team

    Clone from a Forge, sync, and propose a change for review. The shape of teamwork in TOVIO.

    Collaborate

  • 6 · Give an agent access

    Issue a scoped capability token, run the MCP server, and see provenance on every agent commit.

    Agent access

  • Coming from Git?

    Import an existing Git repository — history, branches, and tags carry over. Works today.

    Migrate from Git

If you only have ten minutes

Do Install → Quickstart → Protect a secret. That sequence takes you from nothing to the single most memorable thing TOVIO does — a file that the math, not a server, keeps private inside a shared repo.

Where to go after

Last reviewed September 9, 2026

Suggest an improvement to this page Not for security reports — see disclosure