Permissions

In the previous lesson, you set "*": "allow" in your config — which means OpenCode can do anything without asking for permission. That’s convenient for learning, but in practice you’ll want more control over what happens on your machine.

The three permission levels

Every action OpenCode takes is governed by one of three rules:

When OpenCode asks for permission, you’ll see three options:

• Allow Once — approve this specific action, just this time
• Always — approve this action and similar ones for the rest of the session
• Reject — deny this specific action

Tighten your permissions

Let’s edit your global config to add some safety guardrails. Open ~/.config/opencode/opencode.jsonc in your text editor and replace its contents with:

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "permission": {
    // Allow most things by default
    "*": "allow",
    // But ask before running destructive shell commands
    "bash": {
      "*": "allow",
      "rm *": "ask",
      "rmdir *": "ask",
      "mv *": "ask"
    }
  }
}

Save the file. This config:

• Allows most actions automatically (reading files, editing code, running safe commands)
• Asks for your permission before deleting files (rm), removing directories (rmdir), or moving/renaming files (mv)

How patterns work

Permission rules use simple wildcard matching:

• * matches any number of characters
• rm * matches any command that starts with rm — like rm file.txt or rm -rf node_modules
• Rules are checked in order, and the last matching rule wins

So in the config above, a command like git status matches "*": "allow" and runs immediately. But rm old-file.txt matches "rm *": "ask" and triggers a confirmation prompt.

Going further

You can get as granular as you want. Here’s a more protective config:

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "permission": {
    "*": "allow",
    "bash": {
      "*": "allow",
      "rm *": "ask",
      "rmdir *": "ask",
      "mv *": "ask",
      "git push *": "ask",
      "git commit *": "ask"
    },
    "edit": {
      "*": "allow",
      "*.env": "deny",
      "*.env.*": "deny"
    }
  }
}

This adds:

• Git safety — asks before pushing or committing, giving you a chance to review changes first
• Secret protection — blocks edits to .env files, which often contain API keys and passwords

Available permissions

Here are some of the actions you can control:

For the full list of permissions and pattern syntax, see the permissions documentation.

Once you’ve saved your updated config with at least one granular permission rule (like "rm *": "ask"), this lesson is complete.