Pinakes

A media cataloging and library management system written in Rust. Pinakes indexes files across configured directories, extracts metadata from audio, video, document, and text files, and provides full-text search with tagging, collections, and audit logging. It supports both SQLite and PostgreSQL backends.

Building

# Build all compilable crates
$ cargo build -p pinakes-core -p pinakes-server -p pinakes-tui

# The Dioxus UI requires GTK3 and libsoup system libraries:
# On Debian/Ubuntu: apt install libgtk-3-dev libsoup-3.0-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev
# On Fedora: dnf install gtk3-devel libsoup3-devel webkit2gtk4.1-devel
# On Nix: Use the dev shell, everything is provided :)
$ cargo build -p pinakes-ui

# Alternatively, while app deps are in PATH, you may simply build the entire
# workspace.
$ cargo build --workspace

Configuration

Pinakes runs with its own built-in configuration file out of the box. While using the default configuration, you will not be able to edit the configuration but it will provide the minimum required configuration values to get you going with Pinakes. If you are more interested in fully configuring Pinales, you must create your own configuration. You may copy the example config and edit it to your needs:

# Copy the sample config
$ cp pinakes.toml.example pinakes.toml

Key settings:

• storage.backend - "sqlite" or "postgres"
• storage.sqlite.path - Path to the SQLite database file
• storage.postgres.* - PostgreSQL connection parameters
• directories.roots - Directories to scan for media files
• scanning.watch - Enable filesystem watching for automatic imports
• scanning.ignore_patterns - Patterns to skip during scanning (e.g., ".*", "node_modules")
• server.host / server.port - Server bind address

Running

Server

To use Pinakes, you will need the server to be running. The GUI on its own will work, but it will not be functional without the server.

# Start the server first
$ cargo run -p pinakes-server -- pinakes.toml

# or:
$ cargo run -p pinakes-server -- --config pinakes.toml

The server starts on the configured host:port (default 127.0.0.1:3000). In a production scenario you are encouraged to reverse proxy the service, and prefer SSL.

TUI

The Pinakes TUI can be used to manage your collections from the comfort of your terminal. While the server is running you may connect to it using the --server flag.

# Using defaults
$ cargo run -p pinakes-tui

# or with a custom server URL:
$ cargo run -p pinakes-tui -- --server http://localhost:3000

Keybindings

The TUI component of Pinakes is designed to be keyboard-centric, as it is designed for the terminal. The keybindings are as follows:

Key	Action
q / Ctrl-C	Quit
j / k	Navigate down / up
Enter	Select / confirm
Esc	Back
/	Search
i	Import file
o	Open file
d	Delete (media in library, tag/collection in their views)
t	Tags view
c	Collections view
a	Audit log view
s	Trigger scan
r	Refresh current view
n	Create new tag (in tags view)
+	Tag selected media (in detail view)
-	Untag selected media (in detail view)
Tab / Shift-Tab	Next / previous tab
PageUp / PageDown	Paginate

Desktop/Web UI

Pinakes features a fully fledged Desktop and Web UI powered by Dioxus. Those two components are meant as a GUI frontend for the Pinakes server, and are interchangeable in terms of usage.

# Build the UI
$ cargo run -p pinakes-ui

Tip

By default Pinakes GUI will assume the server to be running on localhost and bound to port 3000. Set PINAKES_SERVER_URL to point at the server if it is not on localhost:3000.

API

There exists a comprehensive UI for the server component that you may query directly from the /api/v1 endpoint. All other endpoints are under /api/v1.

Media

Method	Path	Description
POST	/media/import	Import a file ({"path": "..."})
GET	/media	List media (query: offset, limit)
GET	/media/{id}	Get media item
PATCH	/media/{id}	Update metadata
DELETE	/media/{id}	Delete media item
GET	/media/{id}/stream	Stream file content
POST	/media/{id}/open	Open with system viewer

Search

Method	Path	Description
GET	/search?q=...	Search (query: q, sort, offset, limit)

Search syntax: term, "exact phrase", field:value, type:pdf, tag:music, prefix*, fuzzy~, -excluded, a b (AND), a OR b, (grouped).

Tags

Method	Path	Description
POST	/tags	Create tag ({"name": "...", "parent_id": ...})
GET	/tags	List all tags
GET	/tags/{id}	Get tag
DELETE	/tags/{id}	Delete tag
POST	/media/{id}/tags	Tag media ({"tag_id": "..."})
GET	/media/{id}/tags	List media's tags
DELETE	/media/{id}/tags/{tag_id}	Untag media

Collections

Method	Path	Description
POST	/collections	Create collection
GET	/collections	List collections
GET	/collections/{id}	Get collection
DELETE	/collections/{id}	Delete collection
POST	/collections/{id}/members	Add member
GET	/collections/{id}/members	List members
DELETE	/collections/{cid}/members/{mid}	Remove member

Virtual collections (kind "virtual") evaluate their filter_query as a search query when listing members, returning results dynamically.

Audit & Scanning

Method	Path	Description
GET	/audit	List audit log (query: offset, limit)
POST	/scan	Trigger directory scan ({"path": "/..."} or {"path": null} for all roots)

Testing

# Unit and integration tests for the core library (SQLite in-memory)
cargo test -p pinakes-core

# API integration tests for the server
cargo test -p pinakes-server

Supported Media Types

Category	Formats
Audio	MP3, FLAC, OGG, WAV, AAC, Opus
Video	MP4, MKV, AVI, WebM
Document	PDF, EPUB, DjVu
Text	Markdown, Plain text
Image	JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, SVG, AVIF

Metadata extraction uses lofty (audio, MP4), matroska (MKV), lopdf (PDF), epub (EPUB), and gray_matter (Markdown frontmatter).

Storage Backends

Two storage backends are supported. For convenience, SQLite is the default backend out of the box but for production deployments you may choose to prefer PostgreSQL.

SQLite (default)

Single-file database with WAL mode and FTS5 full-text search. Bundled SQLite guarantees FTS5 availability.

PostgreSQL

Native async with connection pooling (deadpool-postgres). Uses tsvector with weighted columns for full-text search and pg_trgm for fuzzy matching. Requires the pg_trgm extension.