A self-hosted business automation platform: model a process, define the data it works on, and give people the screens to work it.
Most automation tools stop at the workflow engine and leave you to build the application around it. Auton8 ships both halves — a BPMN engine and the records, documents, forms, dashboards and query tools that a process actually runs on — behind one administrable UI.
Status: 0.1. Early, and honest about it. It runs, it is tested, and it is in use — but interfaces move, and there is no upgrade-compatibility promise between 0.x releases yet.
- Workflows — a BPMN modeller and a Flowable engine behind it. Draft, deploy, launch, and trace runs step by step.
- Records — define record types and fields at runtime, then search, edit, relate, comment on, and watch the records built on them. No redeploy to add a field.
- Documents — collaborative editing with tracked changes and comments, DOCX import/export, and bindings that pull live record data into a document.
- Notes and pages — real-time collaborative rich text, backed by Yjs.
- Data stores, datasets and pipelines — connect SQL and file-backed sources, preview and profile them, and move data through code transformers.
- Queries and dashboards — AQL over records and workflow state, surfaced as configurable widgets.
- Forms — define forms and map them onto record types.
- An AI assistant — an in-app agent with tool access to the platform's own APIs, pointed at a model you configure.
- Administration — role- and instance-level authorization, groups, permission explain ("why can this user do that?"), configurable menus and pages, a plugin system, an event bus watcher, and system health.
ASP.NET Core 10 host, React 19 + Vite + TypeScript SPA on Mantine v9, PostgreSQL, Flowable, Dapr with NATS JetStream and Redis, and Node sidecars for collaboration (Hocuspocus) and sandboxed code execution.
Docker is the only prerequisite. From the
latest release,
download compose.yml and env.template into an empty directory:
mv env.template .env
# Set Bootstrap__AdminUsername and Bootstrap__AdminPassword, and generate the
# three secrets the file asks for. Nothing is seeded: without an administrator
# there is no way to sign in.
docker compose up -dThen open http://localhost:5108. Every image is pinned by digest and carries a
signed provenance attestation — QUICKSTART.md in the release shows how to
verify one.
Auton8 1.0 requires a fresh database. Upgrading a 0.x install is not supported; releases after 1.0 will carry upgrade paths.
Requires Docker, the .NET 10 SDK, Node 24 and the Dapr CLI — the authoritative
list with versions is infra/prerequisites, and
make preflight checks all of them at once.
git clone https://github.com/nathanpond/Auton8.git
cd Auton8
make infra-up # Postgres, Flowable, Redis, NATS, the Dapr control plane
# (runs `make preflight` first and stops if anything is missing)
export Bootstrap__AdminUsername=admin
export Bootstrap__AdminPassword='pick something'
make appmake app-container runs the application as a container instead, if you would
rather not install the SDK toolchain. make infra-down stops the stack;
make infra-reset throws away its data.
- Development — the local stack, daily workflow, configuration, and how to run the tests
- Deployment — required overrides, TLS and reverse proxy, runtime storage, and a pre-deployment checklist
- Contributing — how work is planned here and what a good change looks like
- Security — how to report a vulnerability privately
- Codebase map — architecture, structure, conventions, testing and known concerns, in the wiki
The product is Auton8. The code says AutoNate — namespaces, assembly names, environment variables, database and schema names, plugin ABI types. That is deliberate: those identifiers are load-bearing, and renaming them would make stored secrets undecryptable and orphan existing documents. CONTRIBUTING.md has the details.
Third-party components keep their own licences — notably bpmn-js, whose "Powered by bpmn.io" attribution must be preserved in any deployment of the workflow modeller.