What's next

You have a working service from the Python quickstart. Here's where to go from here.

Explore your service with the shell

The Aster shell lets you browse services, inspect contracts, and invoke methods interactively — without needing any type definitions locally.

aster shell <endpoint-addr>

Navigate services like a filesystem, tab-complete method names, and invoke RPCs from the command line:

producer:/$ cd services/HelloService
producer:/services/HelloService$ ./say_hello name="World"
{
  "message": "Hello, World!"
}

See Dial a Service for the full shell guide.

Connect an AI agent

Expose your service to Claude or any MCP-compatible AI agent with a single command:

aster mcp <endpoint-addr>

Every @rpc method becomes a tool the agent can discover and call. No OpenAPI specs, no REST gateways — the contract is the tool definition.

See AI Agent Integration (MCP) for security layers and configuration.

Define richer services

The quickstart used a single unary method. Aster supports:

• Server streaming (@server_stream) — stream results to the caller
• Client streaming (@client_stream) — receive a stream of requests
• Bidirectional streaming (@bidi_stream) — both sides stream concurrently
• Session-scoped services — stateful, per-peer instances

See Defining Services and Types for the full decorator reference.

Prepare for production

In dev mode, Aster auto-admits every peer. For production you need identity and trust:

# Generate a root key
aster trust keygen --out root.key

# Sign credentials for your producer and consumers
aster trust sign --root-key root.key --type producer --out producer.token
aster trust sign --root-key root.key --type consumer --out consumer.token

# Enroll a node with its credential
aster enroll node --profile prod --rcan producer.token

See Trust Model for the full four-gate authorization model, and Configuration for all settings.

Learn the concepts

Topic	What you'll learn
Transport	How Aster connects peers by public key with NAT traversal
Contract identity	How services get deterministic, content-addressed identities
Serialization	The three serialization modes and when to use each
Discovery	How services are published and resolved without central infrastructure