Seed is the open-source implementation of the Hypermedia protocol. It is a small family of programs: a daemon that holds the data and talks to the network, apps that put a person in front of that daemon, services that add email, identity and agents, and tools for scripting. This section has one page per program. Each page is a map for contributors and operators. It is not a user manual.

Everything lives in one repository, github.com/seed-hypermedia/seed. The Go daemon and the protobuf definitions are built with Please and the ./dev script. The TypeScript apps are a pnpm workspace under frontend/. The vault and the agents service are separate Bun workspaces. The mobile app manages its own dependencies with npm. Contributing explains the setup.

The programs

Program	What it is	Where	Talks to the daemon over
Daemon	The Go node: storage, indexing, signing, libp2p sync, gRPC and HTTP.	`backend/`	It is the daemon.
Desktop app	The Electron app: browser, editor, archive and a full peer. Spawns its own daemon and a local agents server.	`frontend/apps/desktop`	gRPC-web on the daemon's HTTP port.
Web app	The site server and gateway: server-rendered pages, the Seed API, site services, browser signing.	`frontend/apps/web`	gRPC-web on the daemon's HTTP port, with a per-request bearer token.
CLI	The command-line client for documents, comments, contacts, capabilities and keys, and the tool that publishes this folder.	`frontend/apps/cli`	The Seed API of a site over HTTPS; optionally a local daemon.
Notify	The notifications and email service.	`frontend/apps/notify` and `frontend/apps/emails`	The daemon's activity feed over gRPC-web.
Vault	The zero-knowledge identity vault that keeps account keys and delegates session keys to browsers.	`vault/`	gRPC-web to the site's daemon for account lookups and signing, and `/ipfs` uploads of profile and capability blobs.
Mobile app	The Expo app for iOS, Android and web.	`frontend/apps/mobile`	The Seed API of a site.
Explorer	A raw-data browser for the network: documents, blobs, feeds, an API lab.	`frontend/apps/explore`	The Seed API of a site.
Seed Agents	The agent runtime: a signed action API, sessions, tools and triggers.	`agents/`	The Seed API, as a client with delegated keys.

The shared packages

Four TypeScript packages sit under the apps, in frontend/packages/.

@seed-hypermedia/client, the SDK. It has no framework dependency and is published to npm. It holds Hypermedia ids and types, blob creation and signing, CBOR, the HTTP client for the Seed API, markdown conversion, the query grammar, key files and vault helpers, and the Hypermedia Schemas engine. Every app uses it, and so do the CLI, the vault and the agents service.

@shm/shared, the app layer: generated gRPC clients, the typed API router and its HTTP server adapter, the universal client abstraction, React Query models, routes and translations. It is not published.

@shm/ui, the React component library, page components, and the shared agents client and models used by desktop, web and mobile.

@shm/editor, the block editor, a BlockNote fork on TipTap and ProseMirror, with a server-side renderer.

The dependency direction is client, then shared, then ui, then editor. The vault and the agents service consume client and shared through Bun file: dependencies, which copy the packages at install time. A watcher script reinstalls them during development.

Ports at a glance

Port	Prod	Dev	Belongs to
Daemon P2P	56000	58000	daemon, spawned by the desktop app
Daemon HTTP, gRPC-web, `/ipfs`, `/debug`	56001	58001	daemon
Daemon native gRPC	56002	58002	daemon, unused by the TypeScript apps
Daemon metrics	56003	58003	daemon
Desktop API bridge, `/api/*`	56004	58004	desktop app
Agents server	3050	3051	agents
Vault		3030	vault
Web app		3000	web
Notify		3060	notify
Explorer		5173	explore

A daemon started on its own, without the desktop app, defaults to 55000, 55001 and 55002. Hosted sites run their daemon on 56000 behind a reverse proxy.

The programs

The shared packages

Ports at a glance

See also