Praetor

Sophisticated pentesting notetaking management that tracks exactly what your team did, when they did it, and
what they knew, automatically & with complete immutability.
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Praetor is a CLI tool built to integrate with your team's existing notetaking workflows, while building an immutable chain of events that helps you reconstruct your entire engagement.

Additionally, it brings plenty of utilities aimed at lowering the friction of notetaking in penetration testing, by offering a fully integrated and cohesive set of commands to run commands, capture output, take quick notes, record credentials securely, modify or delete your past notes, and view and reconstruct any part of your engagement.

• Introduction
• Contents
• Get started
  • Installation
  • Usage
• Contributing
  • Codespaces
  • Dev Containers
  • Local Development
• Acknowledgements

1. Go to the releases page and download the desired version & checksums.txt file. It should look like praetor_{version}_{os}_{arch}.targ.gz
2. Run the following commands in your shell to extract and move to your bin:

tar xzf praetor_{version}_{os}_{arch}.tar.gz
sudo mv pt /usr/local/bin/

3. (Optional) Before moving to bin, verify the checksums:

sha256sum -c checksums.txt

4. Verify the installation succeeded

pt version

pt has countless methods of use. There's no one correct way to use it and it all depends on your environment, existing methods of administration and the needs of your team. It's best to keep up with the documentation and refer to each individual commands use.

Some basic usage could look as follows:

1. Create a new engagement directory

$ pt init test-eng
/home/{user}/engagements/test-eng/

$ cd test-eng

2. Add any file to sync

$ nano final_report.md
$ pt sync add final_report.md

3. Record a tool output

$ nmap -sC 123.45.67.89 | pt capture

# or:
$ nmap -sC -o nmap_result.txt 123.45.67.89
$ pt capture nmap_result.txt

# or:
$ pt run nmap -sC 123.45.67.89

4. View the last few events

$ pt list 3

Praetor follows most standard conventions for contributing, and accepts any contributions from documentation improvements, bug triage / fixes, small features or any updates for issues in the backlog. For more information on contributing please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Praetor has full support for Github Codespaces. These are recommended for small changes or devices with no access to a Linux environment. You can use the buttons below to open the repository in a web-based editor and get started.

We also have full support for Dev Containers. These provide a reproducible development environment that automatically isolates the project and installs the officially supported toolchain.

Clicking the below button will open up VS Code on your local machine, clone this repository and open it automatically inside a development container.

For local development, please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md. Again, we follow most conventions so local development involves the standard flow of fork-PR-merge.

Without others work and research being published for free for anyone to use, this project would not be possible. While we cannot thank every single resource that has influenced this code, we'd like to thank the key resources most directly influential to the systems inside Praetor:

• Jihye Kim, Hyunok Oh FAS: Forward secure sequential aggregate signatures for secure logging
• All of our dependencies & their respective owners

This project is in a WIP state. It is currently unstable and not recommended for use within automated systems or under strict compliance policies. All code is open source and aims to have a minimal, secure footprint, but in it's pre-release stages no guarantees can be made.

This project is licensed under the GPL-3.0 License. Please see LICENSE for more info.

Copyright © Lachlan Harris 2026. All Rights Reserved.