@nacre.work/core

The data model, the permission resolver and the shared types behind Nacre — a self-hosted knowledge index with fine-grained access control.

Most people do not install this. Applications install @nacre.work/sdk, people run @nacre.work/cli, and operators run the container. This package is here because the API, the MCP server and the worker all depend on it — and because a commercial module has to resolve the host's copy of it, which needs it on the registry.

What is in it

The permission resolver and its reference implementation, the schema and its forward-only migrations, the Qdrant filter builder, the BM25 producer both sides of search share, configuration loading, the extension registry, and the types everything else is written against.

The part worth knowing before depending on it

Six invariants hold across every consumer, and breaking one is a security incident rather than a bug:

1. The organization comes from the token — never from a body, path or header.
2. Access filtering is a pre-filter, never a post-filter. The filter goes inside the index traversal, so top_k returns k permitted results.
3. A failure to evaluate permissions denies access. There is no "couldn't compute it, let it through" path.
4. "No permission" and "no such object" are indistinguishable — 404, never 403, including the wording.
5. A deleted document is never returned, including before collection.
6. write does not imply read. admin implies both. This is the opposite of most permission systems and is not a thing to fix.

Extension points

A commercial module registers into these from its module body while loadModules is running:

registerAuthProvider(provider)
registerAuthzResolver(resolver)
registerAuditSink(sink)
registerIngestGate(gate)
mountAdminRoutes(...routes)

The registry is module-level state, so it belongs to whichever copy of this package was loaded. A module that resolves a second copy registers into a registry the host never reads — which is why every module declares this as a peer dependency rather than an ordinary one.

Versioning

0.x, and the packages ship together referencing each other by exact version. A minor bump can move an interface; the extension contract says which parts are load-bearing for a module author.

Apache 2.0. The permission model in full: github.com/nacre-work/nacre.