Aweb Team Membership

aweb Team Membership

Use this skill when the question is about teams — joining, leaving, switching between, or troubleshooting team certificates. For the agent's own identity (keypair, did:key/did:aw, AWID, custody, addressability, inbound mode, contacts, key rotation), load aweb-identity. For day-to-day work coordination, load aweb-coordination. For mail/chat policy, load aweb-messaging. For creating a new team from a template, load aweb-bootstrap.

Foundations

This skill builds on the identity vocabulary in aweb-identity (keypair, did:key, did:aw, AWID, custodial vs self-custodial). Read that section first if any of those terms are unfamiliar. Team-specific additions:

• Team controller — a keypair separate from member identities. Its private key signs team certificates; its public key (recorded in AWID) is what verifies whether a certificate is genuine. Team controllers authorize membership; they do not decrypt member conversations and must not substitute a member's E2E encryption key.
• Team certificate — a signed statement that a specific did:key is a member of a specific team, with an alias and metadata. Public; replicated in AWID. Stored locally in .aw/team-certs/*.pem. A certificate proves team membership; it is not a message-decryption key.
• Team id — canonical form is <name>:<namespace> (e.g. personal:acme.com, aweb:juan.aweb.ai). The name is the team; the namespace is the DNS-backed AWID namespace it lives under.
• Hosted vs BYOT team authority — hosted means aweb holds the team controller signing key (for *.aweb.ai namespaces). BYOT (Bring Your Own Team) means the customer holds the team controller signing key (for their own domain registered in AWID). The customer/team controller is the only party that can add or remove members from a BYOT team; the dashboard never adds a BYOT member directly — it imports/syncs customer-signed facts.

Team-related files in .aw/

For identity files (signing.key, workspace.yaml server URL), see aweb-identity. Team-specific files:

• teams.yaml — local index of teams this identity is a member of. Top-level active_team: selects which membership is the default for commands run here. aw team list reads this; aw team switch <team-id> updates it.
• team-certs/*.pem — public team certificates this identity has been issued (one .pem per team membership). teams.yaml and workspace.yaml reference these by cert_path.

Custody × Authority matrix

Identity custody (where the private key lives) and team authority (who holds the team controller key) are independent axes. Use the matrix to pick the right joining path:

A custodial identity has no BYOT team authority until the customer-signed team certificate and address facts match. Do not infer team authority from identity custody.

For E2E messaging, custody and team membership are still not enough by themselves: the recipient's encryption public key must be identity-authorized as described in docs/e2e-messaging-contract.md. Team/namespace authority may distribute that assertion, but it must not replace the member's key. If an encryption-key check fails, do not suggest a team-controller workaround or plaintext fallback; stop and route the user to the approved identity/key setup or recovery flow.

Readiness checks (membership level)

Start with:

aw workspace status
aw team list
aw id cert show

Interpret failures by what's missing (for self-custodial CLI workspaces; custodial browser/MCP identities live entirely in the hosted account):

• .aw/teams.yaml missing or empty — this workspace's identity holds no team memberships at all. Join one (see paths below) before attempting team coordination.
• No .aw/team-certs/<team>.pem for teams.yaml's active team — identity exists but holds no cert for the active team. Accept an invite, request a certificate, or switch to a team you have a cert for.
• Active team mismatch — teams.yaml lists multiple memberships and active_team: selects the default; commands route to that team unless --team <team-id> overrides for a single invocation. If commands appear to land in the wrong team, fix active_team: (run aw team switch <team-id>).
• Workspace not bound to a server — workspace.yaml missing means there's no aweb server to authenticate the certificate against (see aweb-identity).

Joining a team — match the path to team authority

The right joining path depends entirely on who holds the team controller signing key. Pick by authority, not by the word "invite" alone.

Hosted teams (aweb holds the team controller key)

Three distinct paths exist; they are NOT interchangeable.

Path 1 — Fresh identity at init time. A new agent without any prior identity arrives at a hosted team via OAuth (browser/MCP) or team API-key (CLI):

AWEB_API_KEY=<team-api-key> aw init

The hosted service provisions the identity and a team certificate together. Browser/MCP harnesses do this through OAuth without a CLI. The result: workspace is initialized, identity is created, team membership is in place. Verify with aw workspace status and aw team list.

Path 2 — Existing global identity → "Add existing identity" in the dashboard. When an agent already has a did:aw registered in AWID and wants to join an existing hosted team:

In the app.aweb.ai dashboard, an owner/admin clicks "Add existing identity" on the team, supplies the global identity's address or did:aw, and the backend mints a team certificate with the cloud-held team controller key, registers it in AWID, and prints commands like:

aw id team fetch-cert --namespace <namespace> --team <team> --cert-id <cert-id>
aw team switch <team>:<namespace>
aw init   # if the joining directory still needs server binding

No token round-trip. Direct controller-mint. Available only for hosted teams because BYOT controller keys aren't held by aweb.

Path 3 — CLI invite-token, for hosted self-custodial local or global identities. Hosted CLI invite tokens are redeemed through the cloud, but the accepting directory keeps its own signing key. Use the default form when the owner wants to invite a new local-workspace identity by token:

# Owner side (in a workspace with the necessary authority):
aw team invite                 # local-workspace member token

# share the printed <token>

# Joiner side (in a clean target directory):
aw team join <token> --name <name>

accept-invite refuses to overwrite an existing .aw/ identity and generates a fresh local self-custodial identity in the target directory before requesting the certificate. For a hosted global identity, accept the hosted token with --address <domain>/<name>:

aw team join <token> --address <domain>/<name>

In the hosted --address case, the CLI creates a fresh self-custodial global identity for the address, registers it through the hosted service, and installs the hosted team certificate. The hosted service signs the team certificate; it does not receive the accepting directory's private signing key. If the user already has a global identity and only needs a certificate for an existing hosted team, Path 2 (dashboard Add existing identity + fetch-cert) remains valid.

This is not the cross-machine BYOT path. Do not present it as the normal way to join a BYOT team from another machine.

Do not run aw id team add-member for a hosted team — add-member signs a certificate with the team controller key, which you do not hold for hosted teams. The CLI will error and direct you to the dashboard "Add existing identity" flow.

BYOT teams (customer holds the team controller key)

The dashboard cannot add BYOT members directly. The customer's team controller must sign. Three cases:

Case 1 — Self-custodial identity, cross-machine join. The joining machine doesn't hold the team controller key:

# Joining identity machine
aw id team request --team <team>:<namespace> --name <name>

# Controller machine — runs the exact command the request printed:
aw id team add-member ...

# Back on the joining identity machine
aw id team fetch-cert --namespace <namespace> --team <team> --cert-id <id>
aw team switch <team>:<namespace>
aw init   # if needed

The team controller private key never leaves the controller machine.

Case 2 — Custodial browser identity into a BYOT team. Start from the dashboard's "Create custodial request" action. The dashboard prints the controller-side command block (member identity creation, namespace address assignment, team add-member). The team controller runs that block on their machine, then syncs the signed team state into aweb cloud:

aw id team import-request --team <team> --namespace <namespace> --cloud-team-id <cloud-team-id> --apply

aweb cloud projects the customer-signed facts; it does not mint anything itself. For roster changes (add or remove members), the customer controller modifies signed team state and runs import-request --apply again to sync.

Case 3 — Same-machine local-controller invite-token convenience. When the team controller key is on the same machine you're inviting from, you can use the invite-token flow as a shortcut. Two variants:

# Owner side, same machine, local-controller key present:
aw team invite                 # local-workspace member (default)
aw team invite --global        # global-member token (requires existing global identity in the accepting directory)

# Joiner side (still same machine, different directory):

# For a local invite:
aw team join <token> --name <name>

# For a global invite, the accepting directory must already have a global identity:
aw id create --domain <domain> --name <name>
aw team join <token> --address <namespace>/<name>

For the --global case, accept-invite does NOT create the global identity — it errors with no identity found; run aw id create first, or use --local invite if no identity is present. --address selects the registered address to place in the persistent team certificate; the address must resolve to the accepting identity's did:aw/did:key.

This is the local-controller convenience case only. For cross-machine BYOT joins, use Case 1.

Not a membership path: human dashboard invites

/api/v1/teams/.../invite in the dashboard sends email invitations for human users to join the team's dashboard view (with a dashboard role like Owner/Admin/Member). That is independent of AWID agent membership certificates. Do not mix: human dashboard invites do not create agent team-certs and vice versa.

Accepting an invite vs fetching a certificate

Two distinct local actions install a membership:

• aw team join <token> — redeems a CLI invite token, installs the membership, and connects the current workspace to the service URL embedded in the token. It refuses to overwrite an existing identity. --no-connect intentionally stops after membership installation; when the token/cache identifies the service it prints the exact shell-safe aw workspace connect --service <url> recovery command. A legacy token with no known service still succeeds membership-only and tells the operator to choose the URL. The lower-level aw id team accept-invite <token> remains membership-only. For hosted invites (Path 3), local join generates a fresh self-custodial identity; --global reuses an existing global identity. Local-controller same-machine invites follow the same scope rules.
• aw id team fetch-cert --namespace <namespace> --team <team> --cert-id <id> — installs a certificate that has already been minted server-side (by hosted "Add existing identity") or signed by a controller (BYOT add-member). Used for hosted Path 2 and BYOT Case 1.

If you have a token, use aw team join; it is the complete everyday path. Use the underlying aw id team accept-invite only when an orchestrator intentionally separates membership installation from workspace connection. If you have a cert-id printed by the dashboard or controller, use fetch-cert.