CDB

CDB is a primitive economic database. It tracks the flow of things — what exists, where it is, where it came from, where it went.

What does the C stand for? Some say economic. Some say commodity. Some say community. Some say commune. All of them are right.

What it is

• Small. Five primitives — items, states, transactions, locations, flows — that compose into whatever inventory situation you have.
• Scale-invariant. One person's pantry, a shared household, a maker space, a community.
• API-first. CDB is infrastructure. Automation and integrations live outside as operators and talk to it over HTTP. The API describes itself: GET /openapi.json is a generated OpenAPI 3.1 document covering every endpoint, so clients are generated rather than guessed.
• Yours. Self-hosted, no cloud, no analytics. The data about what you own and consume belongs to you.
• Federated (eventually). Sovereign instances exchanging items and demand signals, peer to peer.

The full documentation lives in docs/ — concepts, architecture, data model.

Running

CDB is a single binary plus PostgreSQL. An instance is configured by a config.toml and a set of definition directories (itemdb sources, locations, flows) — see Storage. Users and tokens live in the database, not in files.

Development

devenv up                              # starts postgres (and provides nightly rust)
cargo run -- example/config.toml       # migrate + serve on 127.0.0.1:8080

Create the first admin (also works as lockout recovery):

cargo run -- example/config.toml bootstrap <name>

Log in with the printed one-time password via POST /auth/login, then manage users and operator tokens through the API — see Users.

The full surface is at GET /openapi.json; GET /health is liveness and GET /ready also checks the database.

Deployment

The container image is built with nix — no Dockerfile:

nix build .#containerImage
skopeo copy docker-archive:result docker://registry.example.com/cdb:latest

deploy/kubernetes/ is a deployment template, one manifest per resource (apply with kubectl apply -f deploy/kubernetes/): itemdb sources are cloned by git init containers (fetching and pinning repos is the deployment's job — core only reads directories), config lives in a Secret, and a minimal postgres is included for small instances.