Overview
Fingerprints in CrewAI provide a way to uniquely identify and track components throughout their lifecycle. Each Agent
, Crew
, and Task
automatically receives a unique fingerprint when created, which cannot be manually overridden.
These fingerprints can be used for:
- Auditing and tracking component usage
- Ensuring component identity integrity
- Attaching metadata to components
- Creating a traceable chain of operations
How Fingerprints Work
A fingerprint is an instance of the Fingerprint
class from the crewai.security
module. Each fingerprint contains:
- A UUID string: A unique identifier for the component that is automatically generated and cannot be manually set
- A creation timestamp: When the fingerprint was generated, automatically set and cannot be manually modified
- Metadata: A dictionary of additional information that can be customized
Fingerprints are automatically generated and assigned when a component is created. Each component exposes its fingerprint through a read-only property.
Basic Usage
Accessing Fingerprints
from crewai import Agent, Crew, Task
# Create components - fingerprints are automatically generated
agent = Agent(
role="Data Scientist",
goal="Analyze data",
backstory="Expert in data analysis"
)
crew = Crew(
agents=[agent],
tasks=[]
)
task = Task(
description="Analyze customer data",
expected_output="Insights from data analysis",
agent=agent
)
# Access the fingerprints
agent_fingerprint = agent.fingerprint
crew_fingerprint = crew.fingerprint
task_fingerprint = task.fingerprint
# Print the UUID strings
print(f"Agent fingerprint: {agent_fingerprint.uuid_str}")
print(f"Crew fingerprint: {crew_fingerprint.uuid_str}")
print(f"Task fingerprint: {task_fingerprint.uuid_str}")
You can add metadata to fingerprints for additional context:
# Add metadata to the agent's fingerprint
agent.security_config.fingerprint.metadata = {
"version": "1.0",
"department": "Data Science",
"project": "Customer Analysis"
}
# Access the metadata
print(f"Agent metadata: {agent.fingerprint.metadata}")
Fingerprint Persistence
Fingerprints are designed to persist and remain unchanged throughout a component’s lifecycle. If you modify a component, the fingerprint remains the same:
original_fingerprint = agent.fingerprint.uuid_str
# Modify the agent
agent.goal = "New goal for analysis"
# The fingerprint remains unchanged
assert agent.fingerprint.uuid_str == original_fingerprint
Deterministic Fingerprints
While you cannot directly set the UUID and creation timestamp, you can create deterministic fingerprints using the generate
method with a seed:
from crewai.security import Fingerprint
# Create a deterministic fingerprint using a seed string
deterministic_fingerprint = Fingerprint.generate(seed="my-agent-id")
# The same seed always produces the same fingerprint
same_fingerprint = Fingerprint.generate(seed="my-agent-id")
assert deterministic_fingerprint.uuid_str == same_fingerprint.uuid_str
# You can also set metadata
custom_fingerprint = Fingerprint.generate(
seed="my-agent-id",
metadata={"version": "1.0"}
)
Advanced Usage
Fingerprint Structure
Each fingerprint has the following structure:
from crewai.security import Fingerprint
fingerprint = agent.fingerprint
# UUID string - the unique identifier (auto-generated)
uuid_str = fingerprint.uuid_str # e.g., "123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426614174000"
# Creation timestamp (auto-generated)
created_at = fingerprint.created_at # A datetime object
# Metadata - for additional information (can be customized)
metadata = fingerprint.metadata # A dictionary, defaults to {}