Cadastre

Know what infrastructure you have, where things belong, and which rules apply.

Cadastre is an address book and rulebook for your servers, services, networks, domains, repositories, and deployment policies. It gives people and AI agents one place to ask questions such as:

• Where can this application run?
• Must it stay private, or may it be public?
• Is the port or hostname already in use?
• Which pipeline and repository own it?
• Is the answer current, verified, or disputed?

Cadastre brings those facts together, explains where each answer came from, and checks proposed deployment files against your rules.

It is a map, not a control panel. Cadastre does not deploy workloads, change DNS or VPNs, operate containers, or reveal secret values. Updating Cadastre updates the map only; it never changes your live infrastructure.

Why use it?

Infrastructure knowledge is usually split across configuration files, dashboards, tools, and people's memory. That works until someone new—or an AI assistant—needs to make a safe decision.

Cadastre turns that scattered knowledge into answers with provenance and clear warnings when information is stale, unverified, or contested. Instead of guessing, a caller gets suitable choices, rejected choices, the rules involved, and the evidence behind them.

Read What Cadastre does for a plain-language walkthrough and example.

Quickstart with Docker

Create an empty persistent catalog with the project image:

docker run --rm \
  -v cadastre-data:/var/lib/cadastre \
  ghcr.io/thedancingdeveloper-org/cadastre:main \
  init --data-dir /var/lib/cadastre --empty

Then confirm it is ready:

docker run --rm \
  -v cadastre-data:/var/lib/cadastre \
  ghcr.io/thedancingdeveloper-org/cadastre:main \
  status --data-dir /var/lib/cadastre

The main image follows the latest successful main-branch build. Production deployments should pin the signed immutable digest published by the release pipeline. If the package is not visible to your Docker client, authenticate to ghcr.io or build the image locally.

To explore without creating a live catalog, clone the repository and query its fictional example:

uv tool install cadastre
cadastre --catalog examples/catalog brief
cadastre --catalog examples/catalog context-for \
  "an internal application that needs a GPU"

Continue with Using Cadastre for catalog setup, common commands, collectors, and remote access.

Optional: the Manifest work register

Cadastre also ships an opt-in module that answers what is outstanding, what matters most, and did it ship. It records work items, initiatives, and links to forge issues and pull requests, collects local Markdown task lists, Git checkout state, and GitHub issue/PR evidence, and reports where the declaration and the forge disagree — without ever writing to a forge.

It is off unless a catalog enables it in modules.yaml. With no such file, the schema, OpenAPI document, CLI help, HTTP routes, and MCP tool list are identical to a build that never heard of it. See Using Cadastre to turn it on and MANIFEST.md for the design.

Built for AI agents

This repository and product are explicitly AI friendly.

Cadastre offers structured MCP, HTTP, CLI JSON, JSON Schema, and OpenAPI interfaces. Answers carry provenance and trust state, while context-for returns the facts and exclusions relevant to one decision and check reviews a proposed artifact before deployment. AGENTS.md provides repository-level instructions for coding agents.

This design gives an agent useful ground truth without turning Cadastre into an infrastructure control plane.

Learn more

Guide	What it covers
What Cadastre does	Plain-language concepts, examples, boundaries, and trust signals
Using Cadastre	Installation, catalogs, commands, collection, and remote access
Architecture	Components, data ownership, and interface boundaries
Deployment	Containers, supported topologies, persistence, and operations
Agent clients	Native MCP and the remote stdio bridge
Plugin authoring	The read-only plugin contract and a single-file example
Built-in plugins	Configuration, credentials, outputs, and limits for shipped integrations
Manifest module	The optional, default-off work register: design, entity kinds, and delivery plan
Security	Network identity and secure deployment profiles
Design	Detailed rationale and non-goals
Testing	Test layers and local quality gates
Examples	Fictional catalog and client configurations
Contributing	How changes are reviewed and merged through pull requests

License

Cadastre is available under the MIT License.