This documentation describes the Astral Network and how to interact with it.
These documents define abstract wire and protocol semantics — types, encodings, and operations are language-independent and carry no binding to any programming language.
- Core primitives
- Common types – common object types
- Protocols
- Basics – protocol documentation structure
- apphost - on-device API for local apps (tokens, handlers, contracts, holds)
- auth - capability contracts, signing, and action authorization
- bip137sig - BIP-39/32/137 seed, key derivation, and message signing
- crypto - signing and verifying hashes and text, public key derivation
- dir - alias management, identity resolution
- lna - lightning network analytics
- nodes - encrypted links and multiplexed sessions between nodes
- objects - typed object storage, retrieval, and provider discovery
- player - music playback and play queue control
- tree - hierarchical key-value configuration store
- user - user identity, swarm membership, asset list
- Tools – command-line tools
- astral-query - send queries from the command line
- Other topics
- Narratives
- Network Architecture - how identities, nodes, links, swarms, and contracts compose at runtime
- Blueprints - runtime wire-structure schemas that let a node encode and decode typed objects without compiled code
- Codec - binary framing layer: type encoders, type tags, and the canonical form of typed objects
- Wire mechanics
- Binary Encoding - default payload encoding: big-endian, two's complement, payload bytes only
- JSON Encoding - optional JSON container encoding for typed objects
- Text Encoding - Base64-based text encoding of objects
- Op modes & composition - single vs batch execution, and chaining single-mode ops into pipelines
- Transports
- HTTP Transport - request-response queries via the local node over HTTP
- WebSocket Transport - sending and receiving queries over the apphost WebSocket endpoint
- Astral IPC - wire protocol for local processes routing queries through the node (mod/apphost)
- Narratives
- Scripts – repo maintenance
- link-vocab.py – link vocabulary terms at their first prose occurrence across docs