superstac

Federated STAC search across multiple catalogs. Query Element84, Microsoft Planetary Computer, and others through one API. Items come back deduplicated, with their collection IDs and asset keys normalized to canonical names — regardless of which catalog they came from.

Status: alpha. APIs and YAML schema are not yet stable. Pre-1.0; expect breaking changes.

Why

A single STAC catalog isn't always enough:

• The collection you need lives somewhere else.
• The catalog you usually use is down or rate-limited.
• Different providers index the same scenes under different names.

superstac queries every catalog you've registered, drops the ones that don't serve the requested collection, runs the rest concurrently with retry and timeouts, then merges and dedupes the results.

Install

There is no published binary yet. Build from source:

git clone https://github.com/spatialnode/superstac
cd superstac
cargo build --release

The CLI binary lands at target/release/superstac.

Quickstart

Drop a superstac.yml next to where you run the binary:

catalogs:
  - id: earth-search
    url: https://earth-search.aws.element84.com/v1
  - id: microsoft
    url: https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/stac/v1

Then:

# what collections does each catalog serve?
superstac collections

# search across all of them
superstac search -c sentinel-2-l2a -b 6.0,49.0,7.0,50.0 -d 2024-01-01/2024-01-31 -l 50

# pipe to jq
superstac --json search -c landsat-c2-l2 -l 10 | jq '.metadata'

# inspect a single collection
superstac collections microsoft sentinel-2-l2a

Run superstac --help for the full surface.

Configuration

Only id and url are required per catalog. Common optional fields:

catalogs:
  - id: cdse
    url: catalog-url
    # Only needed when the catalog uses non-canonical names.
    collection_aliases:
      sentinel-2-l2a: S2MSI2A
    asset_aliases:
      sentinel-2-l2a:
        blue: B02
        green: B03
        red: B04

settings:
  health_check_strategy: "15m"
  deduplicate_items: true
  unify_response: true
  max_concurrent_catalogs: 8
  per_catalog_timeout_seconds: 30
  max_retry_attempts: 2

The full schema and every setting is documented inline at crates/core/src/models/settings.rs.

Library usage

The CLI is a thin wrapper over [superstac-engine]. To embed in your own binary:

use superstac_config::init_from_yaml;
use superstac_core::models::storage::Storage;
use superstac_engine::SuperSTACEngine;
use superstac_search::query::SearchQuery;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let db = init_from_yaml(Storage::Memory, "superstac.yml")?;
    let engine = SuperSTACEngine::new(db);
    engine.start().await?;

    let response = engine
        .search(SearchQuery {
            collections: vec!["sentinel-2-l2a".to_string()],
            limit: Some(20),
            bbox: None,
            datetime: None,
            ids: None,
            intersects: None,
            sortby: None,
        })
        .await?;

    println!("found {} items", response.metadata.total_items);
    Ok(())
}

Crates

Logs and debugging

Logs flow through tracing. The default level comes from settings.log_level in your config; override at runtime:

superstac -v search -c sentinel-2-l2a       # debug
superstac -q search -c sentinel-2-l2a       # warn only
RUST_LOG=superstac_search=debug superstac search -c sentinel-2-l2a

Roadmap

Some things on the way:

• Authentication (per-catalog headers, OAuth, API keys)
• SQLite + Postgres backends
• Python bindings via PyO3
• and many more.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Feedback and issues welcome — this is early. If you try it and you see any bug, feel free to open an issue!