SimplArchive

A showcase of how a senior, AI-driven software developer can produce a complex, enterprise-grade system in a relatively short period of time.

SimplArchive is a working, multi-tenant Document Management System, built end-to-end as a demonstration of AI-assisted software engineering: Clean Architecture, a hypermedia REST API, two clients (a Blazor WebAssembly web app and a cross-platform Avalonia desktop app), OAuth/OIDC auth with MFA and passkeys, full-text + OCR search, document previews, versioning, ACLs, workflow, audit trails, legal hold & retention, WebDAV, a fully localized UI (English, German, Italian, Spanish), and a production Helm chart — with an extensive automated test suite (unit, integration, container-backed E2E, and browser/desktop UI E2E) and a hardened CI pipeline.

▶ Try the live demo

A live instance is running at https://demo.simplarchive.dev — log in and explore, nothing to install. Three people are seeded, so you can also see the app from a colleague's side:

Sign in as	Email	Password	What it's for
Demo Admin	demo@simplarchive.dev	SimplDemo2026!	The tenant administrator — start here. Sees everything: administration, audit, retention, legal holds, every user's inbox.
Anna Meyer	anna@simplarchive.dev	SimplDemo2026!	An editor, and deliberately a plain user without tenant-admin rights — the account to use if you want to watch a permission actually deny something.
Tom Fischer	tom@simplarchive.dev	SimplDemo2026!	A clerk, also a plain user. Signing in as a second person is how the collaboration side shows up: chat and mentions from someone else, a workflow review arriving in another inbox, the shared Scan Team group inbox.

These are deliberately trivial, publicly posted credentials on a throwaway demo that wipes itself nightly — they are demo furniture, not an example of how the product handles secrets.

It resets to a clean, known state every night, so feel free to create, upload, workflow, and delete anything. The user manual is one click away at demo.simplarchive.dev/download/manual/.

Not for production as shipped. The default stack uses development certificates and fixed demo credentials. It is an enterprise-grade architecture and feature showcase; a real production posture still requires hardening the deployment (real secrets/certificates, managed dependencies, and load/scale validation).

🎙 Let your AI give you the tour

Every SimplArchive instance publishes a machine-readable guided tour at /llms.txt. Ask an AI assistant that can drive your browser — e.g. Claude in Chrome — for the tour in your own words (a well-behaved assistant acts on your request, not on a file's): "Give me the guided tour of https://demo.simplarchive.dev/llms.txt — interview me first, and speak my language." It will interview you (areas, depth), then drive the app while narrating aloud. On the shared demo it keeps to a read-only tour; on your own instance it can also demonstrate hands-on filing, indexing and sharing.

Two setups that actually work — a chat that only fetches pages server-side can't click, speak, or reach a localhost instance:

1. A browser-extension assistant — e.g. a claude.ai conversation with the Claude in Chrome extension connected, so the assistant sees and drives your tabs.
2. A local agent on your machine — e.g. Claude Code driving your browser, which can also speak through the OS voice (say on macOS, System.Speech on Windows, spd-say on Linux).

Run it locally (Docker Compose)

The whole stack — API + web/desktop-serving host, Postgres, S3-compatible object storage, OpenSearch + Tika, Gotenberg, OCR, mail catcher, secret store, and a pgAdmin UI — runs from one file:

docker compose up --build

Then open http://localhost:8080 and log straight into the UI with the seeded demo account:

• Email: demo@simplarchive.local
• Password: SimplDemo2026!

Two further seeded users share that password — anna@simplarchive.local (Anna Meyer) and tom@simplarchive.local (Tom Fischer). Signing in as one of them is how you see the collaboration side of the app: chat and mentions from another person, a workflow review arriving in someone else's inbox, the shared Scan Team group inbox. Both are deliberately plain users, not tenant admins, so they are also how you watch a permission actually being refused.

It comes pre-seeded with a demo tenant, a sample repository/document, and a workflow in progress, so there's something to explore immediately. (The same file runs under Podman: podman compose up --build.) Handy dev UIs: pgAdmin at http://localhost:5050 (auto-connected to the database) and the Mailpit inbox at http://localhost:8025.

The entire UI — both clients plus the shared sign-in page — is available in English, German, Italian, and Spanish. Switch language from the flag menu in the web app bar (next to the notifications bell); the desktop app picks it on the logon window.

To try it from another device on your network (a phone, a second laptop), set PROXY_HOST to this machine's LAN IP/hostname and S3_PUBLIC_URL to the matching object-storage proxy URL — an optional Caddy reverse proxy then serves both the app (port 9443) and object storage (port 9444) over HTTPS:

PROXY_HOST=192.168.1.50 S3_PUBLIC_URL=https://192.168.1.50:9444 docker compose up --build

On the device, first visit https://192.168.1.50:9444 once and accept the self-signed-certificate warning (needed so document previews/uploads work), then browse https://192.168.1.50:9443 and accept its warning too. (Dev/test only.)

Native desktop app

Alongside the web client, SimplArchive ships a cross-platform Avalonia desktop client. Build self-contained installers/archives — no .NET needed on the target machine:

scripts/package-macos-dmg.sh          # macOS → dist/SimplArchive-<version>-{arm64,x64}.dmg   (run on macOS)
scripts/package-windows-linux.sh      # Win/Linux x64 → dist/SimplArchive-<version>-win-x64.zip + -linux-x64.tar.gz

All are self-contained and unsigned (a showcase build): macOS Gatekeeper warns on first open (right-click → Open); Windows SmartScreen warns on first run ("More info" → "Run anyway"); the Linux launcher may need chmod +x. The Windows/Linux script cross-builds from any OS with the .NET SDK.

Install in production

Production deploys via the Helm chart in charts/simplarchive — an API Deployment/Service/Ingress/HPA/PDB with health probes, non-root containers, and secret wiring; dependencies (Postgres, object storage, OpenSearch, …) are external/managed. The chart's values.yaml documents the full configuration surface, and pre-install/pre-upgrade migration hooks apply schema changes off the app's startup path.

Architecture at a glance

• Clean Architecture — Domain → Application → Infrastructure/Auth → Api → Client/Worker, with the dependency direction enforced as tests.
• Multi-tenant by construction — global tenant query filters, per-tenant object-storage buckets, and per-tenant tamper-evident (hash-chained, WORM-sealed) audit trails.
• Hypermedia REST API — RFC 7807 problem details, ETag/If-Match optimistic concurrency, media-type API versioning, and independent JSON/XML content negotiation.
• Documents — a unified tree where a repository, a folder, and a leaf are all one Document type; immutable versioned metadata "masks"; EAV index fields; document-scoped ACLs with inheritance + override.
• Search & preview — OpenSearch full-text over content (Apache Tika, incl. OCR), faceted navigation, search hit-overlays, and on-demand previews/renditions (images, Office → PDF via Gotenberg, email, Markdown, …).
• Enterprise features — approval workflow, notifications (in-app + email + real-time), legal hold & retention with WORM immutability, check-out/check-in, a WebDAV gateway, MFA (TOTP + passkeys), and OpenBao-backed secrets.
• Two clients — a Blazor WebAssembly web workbench and a native Avalonia desktop client, both driving the same API.

Tech stack

.NET 10 · ASP.NET Core · Blazor WebAssembly · Avalonia · EF Core (PostgreSQL) · OpenIddict · OpenSearch + Apache Tika · Gotenberg · S3-compatible object storage · OpenBao · Serilog · Docker/Kubernetes.

License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.