keepsake

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten, Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold.

— Sara Teasdale, "Let It Be Forgotten" (1920)

keepsake stores relations that a subject holds until policy ends them: a trusted tag, a 24-hour mute, an entitlement, a hold, a risk flag, a feature gate. Writes are idempotent, expiry runs on a schedule you set, and state is queryable. Lifecycle commands produce typed audit events; the SQLx adapter persists those events through Dovecote.

The core crate is persistence-agnostic and synchronous. The keepsake-sqlx adapter stores domain state through SQLx with migrations and query helpers. Postgres is the default backend; SQLite and MySQL are available behind feature flags. Dovecote is the sole SQL audit and delivery model in 3.0.

I'd written this pattern ad-hoc across production services in compliance-heavy domains, where auditability and determinism are requirements. keepsake is the consolidated version, so you pull in one implementation instead of re-deriving the same rules in every project.

Boundaries

Use the crate directly for a Rust service backed by Postgres, SQLite, or MySQL. For other stacks, the schema, indexes, and lifecycle rules are documented so you can port them to another language, framework, or database.

Some responsibilities stay with your application. Keepsake does not join your entity tables, make authorization decisions, invalidate distributed caches, or consume domain events. It stores relation state and expiry; authorization reads those relations later.

Install

cargo add keepsake@3 keepsake-sqlx@3
cargo add dovecote-sqlx-postgres@0.2
cargo add sqlx --features postgres,runtime-tokio,tls-rustls

Dovecote 0.2 and its SQLx adapters are published on crates.io. Add the adapter for the backend you use; the installation guide covers SQLite and MySQL as well as Postgres.

Run the embedded migration with a sqlx::PgPool:

use keepsake_sqlx::KeepsakeRepository;
use sqlx::PgPool;

let pool = PgPool::connect(&database_url).await?;
let root = KeepsakeRepository::new(pool, "https://accounts.example.test/keepsake")?;
root.migrate().await?;
// Install the selected Dovecote schema before this check.
root.check_schema().await?;
let tenant = keepsake::TenantId::new("account-group-a")?;
let repo = root.for_tenant(tenant);

For SQLite or MySQL, disable default features and enable the target backend and matching Dovecote SQLx adapter. Construct SqliteKeepsakeRepository or MySqlKeepsakeRepository with the matching SQLx pool and the same kind of application-owned absolute source URI. The tenant, source, and event id form the Dovecote event identity; there is no library-owned source default.

See docs/installation.md and docs/reference/feature-flags.md for backend setup.

Documentation

docs/ — guides and reference for integrators
docs.rs/keepsake — core crate API
docs.rs/keepsake-sqlx — SQLx adapter API

Examples: examples/postgres-tags, examples/postgres-sanctions (require DATABASE_URL and a running Postgres instance).

Operations

Migrations: a new installation uses the explicit 3.0 clean domain baseline and a separately installed Dovecote schema. Upgrades use upgrade_migrate() and retain historical audit tables for reconciliation; they are never selected implicitly.
Audit: apply, revoke, and expiry helpers write one Dovecote event in the same transaction as the Keepsake mutation. Page and claim delivery through Dovecote; Keepsake has no parallel audit repository or outbox API.

Lifecycle semantics are always on. Idempotency, duplicate-active prevention, deterministic ordering, opaque subjects, and indexed read paths are part of the contract. An optional relation-definition cache is available; caching active state is left to the application.

License

Licensed under either of:

Apache License, Version 2.0
MIT license