Deployment
Pick a deployment mode based on the audience and operational tolerance:
| Mode | Audience | What’s running | Page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Filesystem | Any team or individual whose catalog does not require access control or progressive disclosure. Includes solo work, prototypes, CI build steps, and Git-shared catalogs. | The podium CLI runs without a daemon, port, or authentication. The catalog is a folder. |
Solo / filesystem |
| Standalone server | Anyone wanting runtime discovery or a single audit log without the full standard stack; single VM behind a VPN; offline or air-gapped environment. | One binary (podium serve --standalone). Embedded SQLite, sqlite-vec, and bundled embedding model. |
Small team |
| Standard | Larger team; multi-tenant environment; governed catalog. | Replicated registry behind a load balancer; Postgres, object storage, and OIDC. | Organization |
The modes share artifacts, author flow, and the underlying shared library. Migration between modes is mechanical: podium serve --standalone --layer-path /path/to/dir against a filesystem catalog turns it into a server source without changing the authoring loop, and podium admin migrate-to-standard exports a standalone deployment to a standard one.
Other pages
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Progressive adoption | An on-ramp from permissive standalone to enforced governance, in stages. Use it once you have a standalone deployment running and want to add identity, sensitivity labels, signing, freeze windows, etc. |
| Operator guide | Day-two operations for a standard deployment: capacity planning, monitoring, alerting, backup and restore, upgrades, security review checklist, common pitfalls. |
| Extending | Plugin SPIs, the forward-compatibility constraints that keep out-of-process plugins on the table, and the external-extension patterns. |
| Vector backends | Configure Pinecone, Weaviate Cloud, or Qdrant Cloud as the registry’s vector backend, in standalone or standard mode. Covers self-embedding and storage-only modes, switching backends on a running deployment, and the local-overlay side path. |
| OIDC cookbooks | Per-IdP setup recipes for Okta, Entra ID, Google Workspace, Auth0, and Keycloak. |