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After You Fork

A short tour of what to change once you've forked Strands Base Agent for your own agent. Follow the Local Python or Docker Compose quickstart first to confirm the unmodified agent runs.

1. Set Agent Identity​

Edit config.yaml:

agent_name: finance-analyzer
agent_description: Analyzes quarterly finance reports and answers questions about them.
agent_version: "1.0"

system_prompt: >
  You are a financial analyst assistant. You answer questions about
  quarterly reports using the tools available to you. Cite sources
  when summarizing data.

Agent name flows through to the A2A agent card discovery endpoint at /.well-known/agent-card.json.

2. Pick a Model​

Default is AWS Bedrock with Claude Haiku. To use a different model or provider:

model:
  provider: bedrock
  model_id: us.anthropic.claude-sonnet-4-20250514-v1:0
  temperature: 0.2
  streaming: true

For Ollama or LlamaCpp, set provider: ollama or provider: llamacpp and the matching *_url field. See Configuration for the full schema.

3. Add Domain Tools​

Drop a Python file into tools/ with @tool-decorated functions, then point config.yaml at it:

tools_files:
  - ./tools/finance_tools.py

See Adding Tools for the details.

4. Add API Endpoints (If Needed)​

The default agent exposes /api/v1/query, /api/v1/query/stream, and chat history routes — see the Built-in HTTP API reference for request/response shapes and the SSE event format. If your agent needs custom endpoints (file upload, batch processing, domain-specific reads), see Adding API Endpoints.

5. Wire External Services​

  • MCP servers — declarative config in config.yaml. See MCP Servers.
  • A2A agents — declarative config in config.yaml for delegating to other agents.
  • Custom session managers / model providers — registered in server.py. See Customizing the Server.

6. Update the README​

Replace the starter README's content with what your fork actually does. Adopters and reviewers should be able to learn the agent's purpose without reading code.

7. Run the Quality Gate​

Before pushing changes:

just check  # lint, format, type-check, test

What You Don't Need to Touch​

These responsibilities live upstream in foundry-agent-* packages and should not be reimplemented in the fork:

  • Tool loading (foundry-strands-agent)
  • OpenTelemetry instrumentation, retry logic, shutdown handlers
  • DI container, agent protocols, lifecycle hooks
  • Middleware (CORS, error handling, request logging)

If you find yourself reaching to rewrite one of these, that's a signal the work belongs in a package PR, not in your fork.