Pinakes

Pinakes, named after the first known library cataloging system designed to be the last library cataloging system you will ever need. Pinakes indexes files across configured directories, extracts metadata from audio, video, document and text files, and provides full-text search with tagging, collections, roles, audit logging and more. It supports both SQlite (for easy bootstrapping) and PostgreSQL (production deployments) as available database 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 Pinakes, you must create your own configuration. You may copy the example config and edit it to your needs:

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

Extending Pinakes

While Pinakes does aim to be as comprehensive as humanly possible, it is not feasible to maintain all features in one gigantic repository without taking on an immense technical debt. To avoid this kind of resource mismanagement while still allowing for all kinds of extension, Pinakes features two features at your convenience:

• REST API Routes
• Plugin API

REST 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.

The server API is, of course, a part of Pinakes core design but it is also how first-party interfaces like pinakes-ui and pinakes-tui interact with the server. You may write your own interfaces for a running Pinakes server with minimal effort by simply sending requests to the API through your preferred means. See REST API documentation on available routes and tips on how to interact with the API.

Plugin API

The other method, which is by far the most powerful but also perhaps the least polished as of writing is the plugin system. This is designed as a means of implementing various user-facing features to Pinakes server by writing your own plugins that can modify certain elements. While this system is not as stable as the server API, it is generally in good shape and example plugins are provided. Please see the Plugin API documentation for more details, examples and design.

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.