Pipedline

Open source

Built in the open.

The code behind Pipedline is published, with the documents that say what it is, what has been verified and what has not. Anyone may read it, run it and change it.

The repository on GitHub

Pre-release. Published as a clean snapshot on 2 October 2026; no real venue runs on it yet.

The licence, in plain words

The code is under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPL-3.0-only). That means:

  • You may run it for your venues, free, with nothing owed to anyone.
  • You may read it, change it and build on it.
  • If you offer it to other people as a hosted service, changed or not, you must publish your changes under the same licence. That one rule is what keeps hosting a choice rather than a trap: nobody, including us, can take the code private and sell it back to venues.

This is a plain-words summary, not the licence. The licence text is the LICENSE file in the repository.

What is in the repository

  • The contract. One document that says what Pipedline is, so no later work quietly turns it into something else.
  • The engine. One codebase, one database, many venues, each kept to its own rows by the database itself.
  • The plugins. Every module and plug, with the definitions the catalogue on this site is meant to be read from.
  • What is verified. A status page that says what has been tested against real services, what only against simulated ones, and what has never run.
  • The tests. Service tests and browser tests that read the result back from the database, not just the screen.

Two guides

Both were written by doing the thing and keeping what was printed.

Running it yourself

From a clean checkout to a running copy on your own Postgres, with your own keys, on your own host. Written for a developer who has not seen the repository before. Every step in it was run against a new, empty database, and the parts not covered (containers, proxy, TLS, custom domains, backup) are listed at the end so you are not surprised.

You need Node 22 or later, pnpm, Postgres 18, and about 4 GB free to build.

Read the self-hosting guide →

Writing a plugin

For a developer who has never seen the repository. A plugin is either a module (code inside the engine, with the venue’s own records) or a plug (a service you already run, with its own tools). The worked example is a real module, the specials board, and every command’s output shown was produced by running it.

A module must be merged into the repository; there is no outside loading yet, and the guide says so.

Read the plugin guide →

Why open

A venue is trusting this with its sales and its guests. Code you can read, a licence that keeps it free, and a public record of what is and is not verified are how that trust is earned. Hosting it for you is a convenience we offer, not a lock you are inside.

Where to look first