crate.social

crate.social is a custom-lexicon publishing service for ATProto. It defines structured record types (social.crate.*) for the things you make — notes, podcast episodes, projects, talks, illustrations — imports from any source (RSS, markdown, manual entry), publishes records to your PDS, and exposes a read API so any frontend can query them.

For the full vision, architecture decisions, and lexicon catalog, see plan.md.

Repo layout

crate/
├── api/          # backend service (Express, Postgres/Kysely, ATProto OAuth)
├── lexicons/     # social.crate.* lexicon JSON definitions
├── importers/    # source adapters (RSS, markdown)
└── landing/      # marketing site (Astro + Tailwind) — hibernating until ready to ship

Sibling repos: The web app has been extracted into a separate repository — crate-web (React 19 + Vite + Chakra UI) — so it can deploy independently to GitHub Pages. crate-web reads lexicon types from ../crate/lexicons/ via a local lexgen:local script. The landing site remains in this repo at landing/ until it's ready to ship.

Prerequisites

• Node 22 (see .nvmrc)
• Postgres (for api/)

Setup (placeholder — packages not yet scaffolded)

nvm use
npm --prefix api install

Convenience scripts at the root:

npm run dev:api       # start api in watch mode
npm run format        # format all files with prettier
npm run lexgen        # regenerate TS types from lexicons/