Bunbooru

A modern, extensible Booru engine built with Bun.

Not a Danbooru clone. A plugin-first media platform inspired by Booru imageboards.

Goals

• Fast
• Type-safe
• API-first
• Self-hostable
• Plugin-based
• AI-ready
• Home-lab friendly
• Scalable to millions of assets

Tech Stack

Backend — Bun, ElysiaJS, Drizzle ORM, PostgreSQL

Frontend — React, TailwindCSS, TanStack Router, TanStack Query

Storage — Filesystem, S3-compatible storage (future)

Features

Core

• Asset management
• Tagging
• Collections
• Search language
• Authentication
• Permissions
• Upload pipeline

Optional Plugins

• Comments
• Notes
• Wiki
• Pools
• Favorites
• AI Tagging
• OCR
• Translation
• Similar Image Search
• Embeddings

Philosophy

Everything is a plugin.

The core should only understand:

• Assets
• Tags
• Collections
• Users
• Search
• Plugins

Everything else extends the core.

Project Structure

apps/
  api/        REST API (Elysia)
  web/        React client
  worker/     Background jobs

packages/
  core/       Domain: Asset, Tag, Collection, User, Permission
  db/         Drizzle schemas, repositories, migrations
  search/     Lexer, parser, AST, optimizer, SQL builder
  events/     Publish/subscribe event bus
  storage/    StorageProvider interface + implementations
  auth/       Authentication & permissions
  plugin-sdk/ Public API for plugins

plugins/
docs/

Getting Started

Requires Bun and Docker.

cp .env.example .env       # configure local environment
bun install                # install workspace dependencies
bun run services:up        # start Postgres (the required service)
bun run migrate            # apply database migrations
bun run typecheck          # verify the workspace compiles
bun run test               # run the test suite

Service data is bind-mounted under ./data (git-ignored), so all state lives in the project folder — bun run services:down keeps it; delete ./data to wipe it.

After editing packages/db/src/schema.ts, regenerate and apply migrations:

bun run db:generate        # emit SQL from the schema into packages/db/drizzle
bun run migrate            # apply pending migrations

Redis is optional — Core never requires it. Start it only when needed:

bun run services:up:redis  # Postgres + Redis
bun run services:down      # stop services

Current Status

🚧 Early Development

See PROJECTPRD.md for the roadmap and ARCHITECTURE.md for the design.