Skip to content

Cloud-Hosted Minder

It's easy to get started with Minder using Custcodian's cloud-hosted instance. With the cloud-hosted instance, we run and upgrade the Minder service, and you can simply install the minder CLI and get started applying security policies to your supply chains. Minder runs as a hosted service for the following reasons:

  • Minder needs to run continuously to monitor and remediate supply chain changes as they happen. The monitoring happens via webhooks, which require a continuously-running server to receive.
  • We believe that hosted services provide the best long-term maintenance tradeoff for small teams -- most teams don't maintain their own source forges (GitHub), messaging systems (Slack or Discord), or build systems (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, etc). We similarly believe that supply chain security should not require ongoing effort for small- and medium-sized teams. Large enterprises may prefer to run their own Minder Service, but this service will still be a centralized effort rather than a per-team process.

The cloud-hosted Minder instance is free for open source projects (including corporate open source projects), and you can upgrade your Minder projects to also cover closed-source repositories starting from $25/month for 10 private repositories.

Installation

You'll need to install the minder CLI to interact with the Custcodian cloud-hosted service.

To install on Windows, use winget:

winget install mindersec.minder

To install on MacOS, use brew:

brew install minder

Oop, need better linux install instructions. For now, download the latest release from GitHub. You will need to unpack the binary like so:

curl -LO https://github.com/mindersec/minder/releases/download/v0.0.86/minder_0.0.86_linux_amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf minder_0.0.86_linux_amd64.tar.gz minder

Selecting a server

By default, the minder CLI will use the Custcodian-hosted Minder instance at api.custcodian.dev. If you are using a very old client or wish to use a different Minder instance, you can use the following methods to configure the remote instance (using the hosted api.custcodian.dev as an example; replace with your own Minder server URL):

Create a config named config.yaml file in your current directory with the following contents:

grpc_server:
  host: api.custcodian.dev

This is useful if you generally manage your Minder configuration from a single directory.

Set the environment variable export MINDER_GRPC_SERVER_HOST=api.custcodian.dev. You can put this in your shell initialization file so that it applies every time you run minder.

If you want to change the minder server you are running against (for example, when migrating to custcodian), you may want to set the --grpc-host=api.custcodian.dev on the minder command-line, as follows:

minder --grpc-host=api.custcodian.dev

This is particularly useful if you have multiple Minder servers running.