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Introduction

For technical teams

Build the system your operation needs.

Norbital is a platform for operational apps — the tools your team runs its work on. You author a workspace as files with Bolt (models, collections, apps, automations, policies, agents), and a host such as Colony turns that source into a live, versioned system: tenant apps, Workspace Studio, immutable release artifacts, and an AI agent under the same access rules.

┌───────────────────────────  Bolt  ────────────────────────────┐
│  Author a workspace as files under src/:                      │
│  data/  access_control/  integration/  agent/  app/  …        │
│                                                               │
│  bolt build  →  one immutable artifact                        │
└──────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┘
                               │  artifact
                               ▼
┌───────────────  Host: bolt-server or Colony  ─────────────────┐
│  the Bolt engine · Postgres per tenant · guest isolates       │
│  Colony adds routing · releases · Workspace Studio · billing  │
└──────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┘
                               │  serves
                               ▼
┌──────────────────────────  Browser  ──────────────────────────┐
│  $bolt reads once or live; writes paint optimistically and    │
│  settle on their outcome; live views stream changes over SSE  │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Bolt defines the workspace; a host runs it
Bolt is the authoring surface, the compiler and the engine. bolt build writes one artifact, and any host runs it: bolt start (bolt-server) on your own machine, or Colony, Norbital’s managed host. Shipped starter workspaces are listed on the templates page.

What you build

  • Models and collections — storage in src/data/model/, and in src/data/collection/ the portion of each model a caller can read and write
  • Write contract — one transform per collection, typed queries and actions, and one statement per write
  • Automations — cron, event and webhook work, and the only place for external I/O and AI
  • Apps — Svelte pages that read and write through the typed $bolt client and @norbital-ai/ui views
  • Security — teams, policies with grants per collection, and approval flows embedded in write grants
  • Norbius — the in-app agent, and envoys on WhatsApp, Telegram or email, under the same policies

How to read these docs

The docs are ordered as the work happens:

  1. Quick Start — build the smallest workspace
  2. File system — the src/ tree and the role of every + file
  3. Collections — model the domain, then expose it
  4. Client — $bolt: reads, live data and writes from a page
  5. Security — access and approval
  6. Colony — hosting, Workspace Studio and deployment
  7. Bolt framework — optional: how Bolt works under the hood