The developer's almanac
Astrologue builds its own foundations, and it builds them in Vala. The collections and the queries, the database layer, the web stack, the cryptography, the packaging — the eleven libraries that power the operating system are the same ones you can take into your own projects: free to run, study, share and improve.
Free software · LGPL-3.0-or-later for the libraries · built with meson, packaged with USM
The working method
Every project in the catalogue keeps the same discipline, so learning one teaches you the next.
I.
Every library is written in Vala, from the Enumerable foundation to the HTTP server. Each compiles to C and the GObject ABI and ships its C header and Vala binding, and most add GIR introspection besides — open to other languages, not fenced in.
II.
Where the ground is hard, the stack stands on battle-tested C: GLib, SQLite, libsodium, GnuTLS, GPGME, libssh, llama.cpp. The Vala libraries contribute the object model and the defaults — not fresh cryptography or a new database engine.
III.
Eleven projects, one shape: a meson.build, a MANIFEST.usm declaring what a project provides and needs down to individual files, and usm-scripts that build, test, install and package it the same way everywhere.
The Web-Stack
The request path of an Astrologue web application, as drawn in Spry's own README: each layer leans on the ones beneath it.
HTTP request handling
pages, slots/state, directives, client JS
users, auth slot, actions, guards
spry_users / spry_user_permissions schema
module + service wiring
the collections and queries underneath every layer above
objects-not-byte-arrays cryptography, wire-compatible with the stack's signed slots
local LLM inference for the applications you build on it
the source packaging that carries the stack — and your own projects too
The catalogue
Grouped by trade. Each card opens onto its documentation: what the library does, how to build and install it, and worked examples from its own source.
I.
the ground the rest is built on
The Enumerable library for Vala — LINQ-style querying plus the Vector, Dictionary, Series and buffer data structures the whole stack is written against.
JSON support for Invercargill: documents become Enumerable collections that query and transform like any other sequence.
Inversion of control for the Web-Stack: a dependency-injection container with modules, scopes and three lifecycles, wired by field injection.
II.
rows, schemas and migrations
A generic SQL abstraction built on Invercargill data structures — query results return as lazy Enumerable rows over a provider-neutral API, with SQLite beneath today.
The Inversion integrations for Invercargill-Sql: DatabaseConfigurator, MigrationStartupService and InversionTypeProvider wire the database into the container.
III.
from socket to signed state
The library for writing HTTP backends in Vala: routing, headers, cookies, form data, JSON APIs, server-sent events, and layered web-config.json settings.
Page rendering and state management for web applications: server-rendered pages, signed and encrypted state slots, directives and actions, bound by a small client script.
Reusable authentication and user-management services for Statum — the signed auth slot, guards and subclassable actions — plus the spry CLI that scaffolds, keys and deploys an application.
IV.
keys, seals and signatures
Developer-friendly cryptography in objects, not byte arrays: sodium boxes, X.509, SSH, OpenPGP and WebPush over libsodium, GnuTLS, GPGME and libssh. It implements no cryptography itself.
V.
language models, locally
High-level Vala bindings for llama.cpp inference: chat sessions, grammar-constrained tool calling, embeddings and tokenizers — running on your own hardware.
VI.
how it all ships
The Universal Source Manifest: a project declares what it provides and needs in a MANIFEST.usm, and usm acquires, builds, tests, packages and deploys it.