Self-hostable, ledger-backed livro de atas for Portuguese collective entities.
A records, signing and archive tool — not a guarantee of legal validity.
Chancela is a self-hostable platform for keeping a Portuguese-style livro de atas (corporate minute book) and the atos societários — the minutes and resolutions of a company or other entity's governing bodies — that belong in it. Its job is to help you draft, review, and preserve those records through a controlled lifecycle — draft → seal → archive — so that what a general assembly, board, or management body decided stays organized, attributable to the people who authored it, and hard to alter after the fact. User-authored templates give each entity type its own house style, while role-based access with delegation keeps drafting and sealing in the right hands.
Once an act is sealed it is written to an append-only, hash-chained ledger that can be re-verified on demand: because each entry is chained to the one before it, later tampering breaks the chain and becomes detectable. That makes Chancela a records-integrity tool — it keeps an organized, tamper-evident history of corporate decisions, but it does not claim legal validity or replace notarial and legal requirements. For the acts that call for signatures, it integrates qualified and advanced electronic signatures (PAdES / XAdES / CAdES) over Portuguese rails — Chave Móvel Digital and Cartão de Cidadão — through external providers.
Everything runs on infrastructure you control. Chancela stores its data in SQLite or PostgreSQL, deploys single-node or multi-node, and is reachable through a web client, a Tauri desktop app, and an API / MCP surface. Per-book export/import with fixity verification, GDPR tooling, and open data formats keep your records portable rather than locked in. It is aimed at the entities and professionals — companies, associations, condominiums, cooperatives, foundations — that need an organized, self-controlled, and tamper-evident record of what their bodies decided.
- Livro de atas & corporate acts — draft, deliberate, and seal acts for multiple entity types.
- Append-only hash-chained ledger — every act is chained; the chain is re-verified on boot and surfaced via
/health. - Portuguese qualified e-signature seams — CMD (Chave Móvel Digital) and Cartão de Cidadão via external qualified providers.
- Fixity export / import — deterministic preservation packages with per-file SHA-256 digests for backup and interchange.
- Durable, encryptable storage — SQLite/SQLCipher (single-node) or a PostgreSQL durability profile.
- Three editions, one core — offline Tauri desktop, self-hosted Docker server, and browser.
See the documentation site for the full capability and configuration reference.
The simplest way to run Chancela is the self-hosted single-node image:
docker compose --profile single-node up --buildChancela publishes no images to any registry — --build compiles
chancela-server from this repository, which takes a few minutes the first
time. There is nothing to docker compose pull.
Then open http://127.0.0.1:8080. The container binds 0.0.0.0:8080 and stores durable
state on the chancela-data volume; GET /health should report persistent: true and
ledger_verified: true. The image is SQLCipher-capable — set CHANCELA_DB_KEY_FILE (or
CHANCELA_DB_KEY) at runtime to encrypt the store at rest.
For a production deployment, follow the hardened Docker guide (read-only rootfs, dropped capabilities, non-root user, encrypted store). For local development from source and the desktop build, see the documentation site.
Chancela is a self-hostable, ledger-backed livro-de-atas platform — a niche the alternatives only partially cover: PT atas SaaS (Arkeyvata, atas.pt) is cloud-only; JUFIL is a book plus a local app; Diligent is an enterprise board portal; DocuSign / Signaturit are e-signature rails; OpenTimestamps is a timestamping primitive. Only Chancela combines self-host + append-only hash-chained ledger + PT qualified e-signature (CMD / Cartão de Cidadão) + fixity export/import.
Verify the cells against your own requirements before deciding — this is a feature comparison, not a legal-validity guarantee. Full table: docs/comparison.md.
| Topic | Where |
|---|---|
| Full documentation site | https://supermarsx.github.io/chancela/ |
| Configuration & deployment profiles | docker/DEPLOYMENT-PROFILES.md |
| Security & hardening | docs/security/hardened-docker.md |
| Feature comparison | docs/comparison.md |
| Product & legal specification | spec.md |
| Contributing | Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub |
| License | Chancela Source License — MIT-derived, non-commercial use only |
- It is a records tool, not a legal shortcut. Chancela helps produce compliant records; it does not create legal validity out of an invalid meeting, missing powers, or a defective corporate process.
- Qualified signing needs external providers. Qualified-signature features still require the appropriate qualified provider, certificate, hardware, and onboarding path — Chancela wires the seams but does not replace them.
- The law corpus is tiered. Cited diplomas carry a status tier — Verified, automated-review, or pending — so you can tell reviewed provenance from work in progress.
- Single-node by design. Authoritative domain state and ledger sequencing live in one process; exactly one instance may write. The PostgreSQL profile is a durability upgrade, not scale-out or HA.
Chancela is released under the Chancela Source License: the MIT License plus a commercial-use restriction. Non-commercial use, modification and redistribution are free; any commercial use requires a separate commercial licence from the copyright holder before that use begins.