Summary

This PR improves the local development/runtime experience for HexStrike, optimizes part of the intelligent smart scan path, and adds Docker support for running the stack in a containerized Kali-based environment.

Changes

Configuration

• hexstrike-ai-mcp.json
  • Point MCP command to the local Python interpreter (python on Windows).
  • Use the actual local path to hexstrike_mcp.py on the Windows machine.
  • Set the MCP server URL to http://127.0.0.1:8888 to match the default HexStrike server.
  • Increase the MCP timeout from 300s to 600s to better handle long-running scans.

Server performance

• hexstrike_server.py
  • Optimize vulnerability detection in the intelligent smart scan:
    • Convert tool output to lowercase once and reuse it for all indicator checks instead of repeatedly calling output.lower().
  • Optimize combined output aggregation:
    • Accumulate per-tool output segments in a list and join them once at the end, instead of repeated string concatenation.
  • These changes reduce unnecessary CPU and memory overhead when multiple tools are executed in parallel and produce large outputs.

Ignore rules

• .gitignore
  • Add a Python-focused .gitignore for this repo:
    • Ignore bytecode and __pycache__ directories.
    • Ignore common virtualenv folders (venv/, env/, hexstrike-env/, .venv/, etc.).
    • Ignore IDE/editor files (.vscode/, .idea/, swap files).
    • Ignore OS-specific junk (.DS_Store, Thumbs.db, desktop.ini).
    • Ignore logs, temporary files, build artifacts, and common tool caches (.pytest_cache/, .mypy_cache/, .coverage, etc.).
    • Ignore generic security-tool output directories (output/, results/, reports/).

Docker support

• Dockerfile
  • Add a Dockerfile based on Kali Linux to provide a containerized environment tailored for penetration testing and security tooling.
  • Intended to make it easier to run HexStrike with the required toolset in a consistent, reproducible environment.

Testing

• Ran Python bytecode compilation to ensure files are syntactically valid:
  • python -m py_compile hexstrike_server.py hexstrike_mcp.py
• No syntax errors reported.
• MCP and server configuration changes are aligned with the documented default host/port (127.0.0.1:8888).