Memory Vault

A private, family-first platform to capture, curate, and relive memories (photos, videos, audio, notes) with granular sharing, powerful curation, and delightful storytelling. Built with Laravel 12.x + Blade/HTMX, queues, and a search layer, optimised for deployment at the root of melknep.uk on a DigitalOcean droplet with CI/CD from the outset.

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Vision

• Private by default. Your content, your rules. No accidental public links; only expiring shares.
• Curated, not dumped. Memories organised into Timelines, Stories, Albums, People, and Places.
• First-class family UX. Mobile-first capture, instant thumbnails, quick reactions, and rich playback.
• Explainable permissions. Per-item and per-circle (e.g., Family, Friends) controls, always visible "who can see this?".
• Durable & exportable. One-click exports (ZIP + JSON) and yearbooks.
• Offline-friendly mindset. PWA install, resilient uploads, background retries.
• Hackable. Clear extension points for automations and new features.

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Product Principles

1. Minimise friction. Two–three taps to capture, tag, and share.
2. Granular ACL without confusion. Simple presets with advanced overrides.
3. Curation as a superpower. Auto-tags from EXIF/faces/places; manual tags; Stories to transform dumps into narratives.
4. Delight in playback. Smooth browsing, crisp media, and rich context.
5. Deploy light, run lean. Optimised for a single droplet but scalable.
6. Observability and resilience. Transparent processing states and CI/CD pipelines for safe iteration.

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Deployment Vision (Root Domain)

• Domain: Serve the Vault app directly at https://melknep.uk.
• Droplet setup: Nginx + PHP-FPM 8.3, Redis, Postgres, Meilisearch, FFmpeg, ImageMagick.
• Process management: Supervisor for queues; Horizon dashboard (auth-protected).
• Storage: S3-compatible (DO Spaces or Backblaze B2) for originals and derivatives.
• Backups: Automated Postgres + storage backups to external bucket.
• TLS & CDN: Let’s Encrypt certificates; optional Cloudflare CDN.

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CI/CD Plan

• GitHub Actions workflow:
  • Lint & static analysis: Pint, Larastan.
  • Test: Pest (unit & feature).
  • Build: Vite/Tailwind.
  • Deploy: SSH/rsync to droplet, release into /var/www/memory-vault/releases/<ts>.
  • Run migrations, cache configs/routes/views, swap symlink, reload services.
  • Optional zero-downtime with blue/green approach.
• Secrets in GitHub Actions Secrets (DROPLET_HOST, DROPLET_USER, SSH_KEY, ENV_FILE_BASE64, S3/B2 creds).

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Roadmap Adjustments for Root-Domain Droplet & CI/CD

Week 1 – Foundation & CI/CD

• Provision droplet; install stack; secure SSH.
• Configure domain melknep.uk → droplet.
• Breeze auth, Tailwind layout.
• GitHub Actions pipeline (lint, static analysis, test, build, deploy to staging branch target).

Week 2 – Media Pipeline

• Install/configure FFmpeg + ImageMagick.
• Implement ProcessMedia job (thumbnails, web derivatives, EXIF ingest, pHash).
• Wire to queues under Supervisor; verify Horizon on staging.

Week 3 – Permissions & Secure Delivery

• Circles + item-level grants.
• Signed URLs for media delivery.
• Test expiry and ACL enforcement under real droplet load.
• Deploy to production branch target.

Post-MVP

• Face clustering microservice.
• Map view & GPS clustering.
• Advanced search facets.
• PWA offline caching + queued background uploads.
• Blue/Green deploy option for minimal downtime.

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Testing Strategy

• Local/staging parity tests.
• CI pipeline runs: Pint, Larastan, Pest, browser snapshots for HTMX.
• Load test key endpoints before production switch.

Quickstart

Seed an initial admin user

php artisan db:seed --class=AdminUserSeeder

Set ADMIN_EMAIL and ADMIN_PASSWORD in your .env before seeding.

Generate an invitation

After logging in as an admin, visit /admin/invitations to create an invitation link. Share the generated link with invitees so they can register.