Core concepts
How your work is organised
- Organisation. A closed space with its own members, roles and data. Agencies usually keep one per client. One account can belong to several. More under What is an organisation?
- Project. Sits in an organisation and bundles tickets, documents and time. People see only the projects they belong to. More under Create your first project.
- Ticket. The unit of work, as a list or a board. Statuses, priorities and fields are defined per project. More under Tickets.
- Role. Decides what someone may see and do, which is also how clients get access of their own. More under Roles and permissions.
Two kinds of account
A user works in organisations and signs in at /users/sign_in. An instance admin
looks after the whole installation and signs in at /admin. The two are separate accounts
with separate sign-ins. On our cloud we are the instance admin; on your own server, you are.
How an instance is built
Lalabase is a Rails application with server-rendered pages (Hotwire, no React). It needs:
| Part | Job |
|---|---|
| Application | web interface, REST API and MCP server |
| Worker | background work: mail, notifications, AI (Solid Queue) |
| PostgreSQL with pgvector | all data, including the search index of the assistant |
| Redis-compatible store | live updates and cache (the Docker setup uses Valkey) |
Docker Compose starts all of these for you, plus Caddy for HTTPS. See system requirements.
Ways in from outside
Besides the web app there are the MCP server for agents,
the CLI tool for the terminal and a REST API at
/api/v1. All three use the same access tokens. The
REST API has no public reference yet.