Building From Source

Build ObsidianLog from source, including the Sia backend.

ObsidianLog isn’t published to crates.io yet, so building from source means cloning the repository directly:

git clone https://github.com/emmaglorypraise/ObsidianLog
cd ObsidianLog
cargo build --release

That builds the default, Sia-free workspace. To build the CLI with the Sia backend too, use:

cargo build -p obsidianlog-cli --release --features sia

Running the standalone ingest server directly

obsidianlog-ingest is a standalone binary you can run without the CLI. Unlike obsidianlog serve (which manages the key for you), the standalone binary never reads its encryption key from the config file. It refuses to start until you pass one via OBSIDIANLOG_ENCRYPTION_KEY (a 64-character hex string) or OBSIDIANLOG_ENCRYPTION_KEY_FILE (a path to a file containing that string, the convention for a mounted Docker/Kubernetes secret):

OBSIDIANLOG_ENCRYPTION_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32) ./target/release/obsidianlog-ingest

The obsidianlog CLI’s init/serve manage this key for you instead. See obsidianlog init and obsidianlog serve.

Building with the Sia backend

The official prebuilt release binaries already ship with the sia Cargo feature. Sia is this project’s Foundation-sponsored storage path, so it’s built into obsidianlog by default. init still defaults to the local backend unless you choose Sia. Building it yourself from source needs the feature passed explicitly. The Sia build command above does that. Default builds/tests stay Sia-free because the integration depends on a pre-1.0 SDK (see ADR-0006).

The command above writes the Sia-capable binary to target/release/obsidianlog. Use cargo install --path crates/obsidianlog-cli --features sia instead only if you specifically want Cargo to install it into your user-wide Cargo bin directory.

Without this feature, serve/query/verify fail with a clear error the moment a config points at a Sia indexer, rather than silently falling back to the local backend. See Storage Backends for what the Sia backend actually connects to.