Ekklesia is an open, modular church technology platform for composing backend capabilities into independently developed dashboards, websites, mobile apps, kiosks, displays, and other surfaces.

Current status

Phase 3 is underway. The repository now includes public module contracts, independently versioned capabilities, static module manifests, deterministic automatic discovery, compiled server loading, a staged capability registry, dependency-ordered lifecycle with rollback, module-owned Drizzle table contracts, deterministic schema aggregation, and a cloneable backend-only module template. Migration artifacts now have module-owned Drizzle contracts, deterministic offline discovery, explicit destructive-change declarations, and exact checksums. Core now provides read-only applied-history planning and a locked, whole-batch transactional PostgreSQL runner with exact external destructive approval matching. A hermetic live PostgreSQL suite now proves history, rollback, statement breakpoints, advisory-lock concurrency and release, exact destructive approvals, and sanitization against the production adapter. Production approval-provider composition, identity, HTTP routing, jobs, physical storage provisioning, surfaces, and feature modules remain later vertical slices.

Quick start

Prerequisites: Node.js 24 LTS, pnpm 11.12, and Docker with Compose.

pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
cp .env.example .env
pnpm infrastructure:up
pnpm modules:validate
pnpm migrations:validate
pnpm migrations:plan
pnpm test:migrations:integration
pnpm verify

pnpm migrations:plan uses DATABASE_URL from the uncommitted .env and is read-only. pnpm migrations:apply uses the same validated inventory but mutates PostgreSQL under Core's advisory lock and one transaction. Review the plan before applying. Destructive migrations are blocked by default and require an exact externally supplied approval; there is no force flag.

The runner has both deterministic unit coverage through a narrow database port and a separate live PostgreSQL integration suite. The live command creates and destroys disposable Docker infrastructure; it remains separate from the Docker-free pnpm verify gate.

Run pnpm infrastructure:smoke for an isolated end-to-end PostgreSQL and authenticated S3 check.

The development services bind only to loopback:

PostgreSQL: 127.0.0.1:5432
S3-compatible object storage: 127.0.0.1:8333

The values in .env.example are development-only and must never be reused in a deployed environment.

Architecture

No open-source license has been selected yet. A license should be added only after the project owner makes that decision.