Introduction

mtui is an improved, idiomatic Rust successor to openSUSE/mtui — the Maintenance Test Update Installer, SUSE QE’s tool for validating maintenance updates: load a request by RRID, install and test it on reference hosts over SSH in parallel, then approve or reject. It drives the OBS/IBS and Gitea review workflows and openQA/QEM; reports load from and upload to TeReGen’s v2 API.

mtui is memory-safe, async-native, and distributed as two static binaries, while preserving the data-format and workflow contracts that keep it interoperable with the SUSE maintenance ecosystem: the RRID grammar, the refhosts.yml schema, the report document schema, and the remote-lock wire format.

Two surfaces

• mtui — the interactive REPL (line editing, tab completion, history). See Invocation for how to launch it and seed a session.
• mtui-mcp — a Model Context Protocol server whose tools are synthesised from the same command registry as the REPL, so the CLI and the MCP surface never drift. See MCP server.

This book

• Installation — build from source, install the binaries, completions, and man pages.
• Invocation — the mtui and mtui-mcp binary flags and how to start a session.
• Configuration — the TOML config file, its resolution order, and every option with its default.
• Command reference — every REPL command and its arguments, generated directly from the command registry.
• Workflow concepts — fan-out across templates, reference-host pool selection, host state, and locking.
• MCP server — running mtui-mcp, the tool surface, the testreport and job tools, profiles, and the security boundary.
• Architecture — the crate layout and the data-format contracts.
• Developer guide — the toolchain, quality gates, the command trait, how to add a command, and testing conventions.
• FAQ.

For contributor conventions and the definition of done, see AGENTS.md, which lives in the repository root.