@corbits/memory

Hybrid semantic and full-text document memory in Postgres with pgvector, with optional embedding and rerank endpoints. A Corbits hub module: it mounts Hono routes on @intx/hub-api that check Interchange grants (permissions a principal, a user or agent account, holds on a resource), and ships agent tools for the sidecar, the Interchange agent runtime.

Why @corbits/memory?

1. One store for people and agents. Users add documents through the tenant routes, and deployed agents read and write the same store through run-scoped routes and a sidecar tool pack.
2. Access follows grants. Each document carries access tags. A caller sees a document only when a grant covers one of its tags, and the creator always sees their own.
3. Search degrades instead of failing. With no embedding endpoint, or when one is down, search falls back to Postgres full-text search and says so in a degraded field.
4. Migrations that replay safely. Every SQL file is idempotent, so running the migrations again is a no-op.

It does not generate answers: inference stays with the host, which calls search and passes the results to its own model.

Install

bun add @corbits/memory \
  @intx/agent @intx/authz @intx/db @intx/hub-api @intx/log @intx/types @intx/workflow \
  drizzle-orm hono hono-openapi postgres

Postgres needs the pgvector extension.

Quickstart

With DATABASE_URL pointing at a hub database that has run runMemoryMigrations (see Using with Interchange):

import { createMemory, loadMemoryConfig } from "@corbits/memory";

const memory = createMemory({ config: loadMemoryConfig() });

await memory.add({
  tenantId: "acme",
  principalId: "alice",
  content: { title: "Deploys", text: "Staging deploys run from main." },
});
console.log(
  await memory.search({
    tenantId: "acme",
    principalId: "alice",
    query: "staging",
  }),
);
await memory.close();

acme and alice must be a tenant and principal in the hub. The search returns the document just added.

Where it fits

Interchange runs AI agents as principals: accounts with their own identity, permissions and credentials. Its hub is the multi-tenant control plane that holds tenants, principals and grants (permissions a principal holds on a resource); its sidecar is the agent runtime.

• Runs in: the hub, as routes on its Hono app and tables in its Postgres (memory schema).
• Plugs into: @intx/hub-api routes and grants, @intx/db (its DBConfig, and its tenant and principal tables as foreign-key targets), @intx/agent tools on the sidecar, and @intx/workflow for the resident distiller.
• Pairs with: @corbits/embedding and @corbits/reranking endpoints, @corbits/agent-token for agent bearer tokens, and @corbits/cron to tick the distiller.

Reference

createMemory(options)

Option	Type	What the host provides
config	MemoryConfig	Database and endpoint settings, usually from loadMemoryConfig(). Required unless documentStore is set.
documentStore	DocumentStore	Optional. A custom storage backend in place of the Postgres engine.
grantStore	GrantStore	Optional. The hub's grant store. Without it, search and list return only the caller's own documents.
conditionRegistry	ConditionRegistry	Optional. The hub's condition registry for conditional grants.
textExtractor	TextExtractor	Optional. Turns add({ file }) bytes into text; without it, only add({ content }) is served.

The returned Memory has add, search and list, which take the caller's tenantId and principalId; feed on the Postgres engine; capabilities, whose embeddingsConfigured says whether dense retrieval is on; and close.

Other root exports: MemoryError and RerankConfigError, the SEARCH_LIMIT_* and LIST_LIMIT_* bounds, MEMORY_GRANT_REQUIREMENTS and capabilityIdsForSurface, MEMORY_TOOL_DEFINITIONS, createMemoryHttpClient for calling the routes over HTTP, and the DocumentStore port types. loadMemoryConfig is also at @corbits/memory/config.

createMemoryRoutes(deps)

Returns a Hono<TenantEnv> sub-app. Mount it at /api/tenants/:tenantId/memory, below the middleware that sets principal and tenant on the context (Interchange's createResolveTenant does). Identity always comes from the context, never from the request body.

Route	Grant	Does
POST /add	memory:add	Adds a document, or a new version of one.
POST /search	memory:search	Hybrid search over the documents the caller can see.
GET /list	memory:search	Recent documents the caller can see.
GET /feed	memory:search	New versions after a feed_seq cursor, for consumers.
POST /documents/:documentId/forget	memory:forget	Drops a document from search and redacts its text, including the raw capture. Creator only.
POST /documents/:documentId/purge	memory:purge	Deletes a document, its versions and its raw captures. Creator only.
POST /versions/:versionId/retention-class	memory:forget	Sets a version's retention class. Creator only.

A missing principal answers 401 and a missing grant answers 403. callerResolver is optional: it resolves a non-session caller to a { tenantId, principalId } before the same grant checks run, and a malformed result answers 500.

Sharing on add needs grants the host may have to mint. share.principals writes each peer a search grant on memory.doc:<documentId> only when grantStore has a putGrant method; Interchange's stock grant store has none, so on a stock hub the host mints those grants. share.tenant never writes grants: the host grants search on memory.tenant:<tenantId> to whoever should see tenant-wide documents.

runMemoryMigrations(config, { schema, ftsLanguage })

Takes the same DBConfig and schema as Interchange's runMigrations. schema holds the host's tenant and principal tables; this package's tables always go in memory. ftsLanguage is fixed into the full-text index and must match FTS_LANGUAGE at runtime.

Each run replays every file in one transaction behind a Postgres advisory lock, so every replica can call it at boot: concurrent runs wait their turn. A run also waits behind long queries on memory's tables rather than timing out.

loadMemoryConfig()

Reads the environment. DATABASE_URL must point at the same database as the DBConfig passed to runMemoryMigrations. Set EMBED_BASE_URL and EMBED_MODEL together for dense retrieval, or leave both unset for full-text search only.

Variable	Default	Meaning
DATABASE_URL	required	Postgres with pgvector.
DB_POOL_MAX	8	Connection pool size.
FTS_LANGUAGE	english	Postgres text search configuration.
EMBED_BASE_URL	none	Embedding endpoint.
EMBED_MODEL	none	Embedding model name.
EMBED_API_STYLE	openai	openai, tei or ollama.
EMBED_API_KEY	none	Bearer token for the embedding endpoint.
EMBED_TIMEOUT_MS	10000	Embedding request timeout.
RERANK_BASE_URL	none	Cross-encoder rerank endpoint.
RERANK_MODEL	none	Rerank model name.
RERANK_API_KEY	none	Bearer token for the rerank endpoint.
RERANK_MAX_DOC_CHARS	derived from the model	Per-document character budget sent to the reranker.
RERANK_TIMEOUT_MS	10000	Rerank request timeout.

mountWorkflowMemory(app, { memory, agentToken })

Registers /add, /search, /list and /feed for deployed agents. A request carries the agent's bearer token and an x-workflow-run-address header; agentToken.verify checks the token and agentToken.resolveRun maps the address to the run's tenant and principal. Every call is confined to that run.

@corbits/memory/sidecar-bundle

memory is an @intx/agent tool pack: memory_add, memory_search, memory_list and memory_feed. They call the run-scoped routes at /api/workflow-memory through the agent's hub credential.

@corbits/memory/distiller

createResidentDistiller({ mailTo, inference }) returns a workflow and an agent that turn new versions from the feed into distilled claims. Each mail to mailTo runs one pass; the host decides when to send it.

Using with Interchange

Run the migrations after Interchange's, mount the tenant and run-scoped routes on the same Memory, grant memory:add and memory:search to principals that use it (and memory:forget and memory:purge to creators who may retract their documents), and give agents the tool pack.

import { timeWindowEvaluator } from "@intx/authz";
import { createDB, createGrantStore, runMigrations } from "@intx/db";
import { createRequireGrant } from "@intx/hub-api";
import {
  createMemory,
  createMemoryRoutes,
  loadMemoryConfig,
} from "@corbits/memory";
import { runMemoryMigrations } from "@corbits/memory/migrations";

const dbConfig = {
  host: "localhost",
  port: 5432,
  user: "postgres",
  password: "postgres",
  database: "interchange",
};

await runMigrations(dbConfig, { schema: "public" });
await runMemoryMigrations(dbConfig, {
  schema: "public",
  ftsLanguage: "english",
});

const { db } = createDB(dbConfig);
const grantStore = createGrantStore(db);
const conditionRegistry = { time_window: timeWindowEvaluator };
const memory = createMemory({
  config: loadMemoryConfig(),
  grantStore,
  conditionRegistry,
});

export const memoryRoutes = createMemoryRoutes({
  memory,
  requireGrant: createRequireGrant({ grantStore, conditionRegistry }),
});

Mount memoryRoutes on the hub app at /api/tenants/:tenantId/memory, behind the hub's auth and tenant middleware.

For agents, mount mountWorkflowMemory(new Hono<WorkflowMemoryEnv>(), { memory, agentToken }) at /api/workflow-memory. agentToken is the host's { verify, resolveRun }: verify checks the agent's bearer (for example with createAgentTokenVerifier from @corbits/agent-token), and resolveRun maps a run address to the run's tenant and principal from the hub's workflow runs.

Add the tools to an agent and bind its hub credential to the agent's hub token when you deploy it:

import { defineAgent, type InferencePreference } from "@intx/agent";
import { memory } from "@corbits/memory/sidecar-bundle";

export function buildAssistant(sources: readonly InferencePreference[]) {
  return defineAgent({
    id: "assistant",
    systemPrompt: "You save and recall the team's notes.",
    capabilities: [],
    inference: { sources },
    tools: [memory],
  });
}

Upgrading from 0.1

• createMemory({ app }) and registerMemoryRoutes are replaced by createMemoryRoutes(deps). Mount it with app.route("/api/tenants/:tenantId/memory", …).
• runMemoryMigrations(databaseUrl, opts) is now runMemoryMigrations(dbConfig, { schema, ftsLanguage }). ftsLanguage is required.
• The first run upgrades a 0.1.0 database in place with no data loss and drops the 0.1.0 migration ledger. You cannot roll back to 0.1.0, and 0.1.0 and 0.2.0 replicas must not share a database.
• @intx/*, drizzle-orm, hono, hono-openapi and postgres are peer dependencies.
• Internal helpers and test fakes are no longer exported from the package root: the share-grant, transform, retention and feed services, the distiller re-exports (import them from @corbits/memory/distiller), corroboration scoring, the embed model registry, degrade metrics, the FTS language helpers, createFakeDocumentStore/createFakeSourceProvider, createInMemoryWritableGrantStore/isWritableGrantStore, resolveGrantConfig/GrantConfig and registerMemoryRoutes. runMemoryMigrations is only exported from @corbits/memory/migrations.

License

LGPL-2.1-only