Root

Root is a personal knowledge system built around one conviction: spending time learning is only valuable if you actually retain what you learn.

Books, podcasts, YouTube videos, PDFs, articles — all of it tends to scatter across highlights, tabs, and half-finished notes. Root gives it a single, queryable home, and is built on two principles:

1. Learning requires reflection. You retain ideas by condensing, articulating, and connecting them in your own words — not by passively consuming them.
2. One home for everything. Search across all your sources in natural language and surface connections you'd otherwise miss.

Root doesn't do your thinking for you. It creates the conditions for you to think harder, deeper, and longer.

Product Preview

The Core Loop

1. Capture — upload and highlight PDFs, transcribe podcasts (AssemblyAI) and highlight straight from the transcript, import YouTube videos by URL, or paste citations manually.
2. Synthesize — each source gets a maximum of five takeaways. The limit is the point: deciding what actually mattered is where retention happens. Cross-source notes connect ideas that span books, podcasts, and conversations.
3. Recall — RAG queries against your whole library with grounded, cited answers; spaced repetition (SM-2) generated from your takeaways; hybrid semantic + full-text search for the things you half-remember.

Architecture

Service	Stack	Role
frontend/	Vite + React 19, TanStack Router, React Query, shadcn/ui	SPA — UI and client-side routing
auth-server/	Better-Auth on Hono/Bun	Sessions, JWTs, JWKS, user management; owns the auth schema
fast-api/	FastAPI + SQLAlchemy	The application backend: all CRUD, RAG, embeddings, LLM calls, external integrations
go-api/	Go + golang-migrate	Schema migration runner (applies migrations/*.sql, serves /health) — not in the request path
nginx/	Nginx	Ingress: routing, rate limiting, security headers

• Database: PostgreSQL with pgvector (semantic search) and GIN/BM25 full-text search.
• Auth: the auth-server issues JWTs; FastAPI validates them via JWKS. No shared secrets.
• Type safety: FastAPI OpenAPI → orval → TypeScript, consumed by the frontend and the Expo mobile app (mobile/).
• External services: Voyage AI (embeddings), OpenAI / Gemini / Anthropic (LLMs), AssemblyAI (transcription), Cloudflare R2 (storage), Resend (email).

Getting Started

Prerequisites: Docker, Node 20+/pnpm, Bun, Python 3.13+/uv, Go 1.23+.

git clone https://github.com/Dappner/root.git
cd root
cp .env.example .env        # fill in what you need; most AI keys are optional for basic use

make up                     # local stack via docker compose (nginx on :8000)
make migrate-up             # apply schema migrations
make seed-db                # optional: seed a local admin user

For iterating on a single service, run it directly (pnpm dev in frontend/, uv run uvicorn app.main:app --reload --port 8081 in fast-api/, bun run dev in auth-server/). The Makefile wraps env injection with Doppler; without Doppler, export the variables from .env yourself.

Documentation

• AGENTS.md — architecture overview, plus per-service guides in frontend/, fast-api/, go-api/, mobile/, auth-server/
• Product overview and philosophy
• Review system (spaced repetition)
• Podcast transcripts

License

Root is licensed under the MIT License.

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Root — spend more time learning, remember more of what you learn, and see the connections between the things you know. Not an AI that thinks for you — a system that makes you think better.