SpiceDB

SpiceDB

SpiceDB is an open source, Google Zanzibar-inspired database for creating and managing security-critical application permissions.

Developers create a schema and use client libraries to apply the schema to the database, insert relationships into the database, and query the database to efficiently check permissions in their applications.

Features that distinguish SpiceDB from other systems include:

• Expressive gRPC and HTTP/JSON APIs for checking permissions, listing access, and powering devtools
• A distributed, parallel graph-engine faithful to the architecture described in Google's Zanzibar paper
• A flexible consistency model configurable per-request that includes resistance to the New Enemy Problem
• An expressive schema language with a playground and CI/CD integrations for validation and integration testing
• A pluggable storage system supporting in-memory, Spanner, CockroachDB, PostgreSQL and MySQL
• Deep observability with Prometheus metrics, pprof profiles, structured logging, and OpenTelemetry tracing

Want to learn more about the inspiration for SpiceDB? We've annotated Google's Zanzibar Paper with our own commentary.

Joining the Community

SpiceDB is a community project where everyone is invited to participate and feel welcomed. While the project has a technical goal, participation is not restricted to those with code contributions.

Learn

• Ask questions via GitHub Discussions or our Community Discord
• Read blog posts from the Authzed team describing the project and major announcements
• Watch our YouTube videos about SpiceDB, modeling schemas, leveraging CNCF projects, and more
• Explore the SpiceDB Awesome List that enumerates official and third-party projects built by the community
• Reference community examples for demo environments, integration testing, CI pipelines, and writing schemas

Contribute

CONTRIBUTING.md documents communication, contribution flow, legal requirements, and common tasks when contributing to the project.

You can find issues by priority: Urgent, High, Medium, Low, Maybe. There are also good first issues.

Our documentation website is also open source if you'd like to clarify anything you find confusing.

Getting Started Installing the binary

Binary releases are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows on AMD64 and ARM64 architectures.

Homebrew users for both macOS and Linux can install the latest binary releases of SpiceDB and zed using the official tap:

brew install authzed/tap/spicedb authzed/tap/zed

Debian-based Linux users can install SpiceDB packages by adding a new APT source:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y curl ca-certificates gpg
curl https://pkg.authzed.com/apt/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo echo "deb https://pkg.authzed.com/apt/ * *" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fury.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y spicedb zed

RPM-based Linux users can install SpiceDB packages by adding a new YUM repository:

sudo cat << EOF >> /etc/yum.repos.d/Authzed-Fury.repo
[authzed-fury]
name=AuthZed Fury Repository
baseurl=https://pkg.authzed.com/yum/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF
sudo dnf install -y spicedb zed

Container images are available for AMD64 and ARM64 architectures on the following registries:

• authzed/spicedb
• ghcr.io/authzed/spicedb
• quay.io/authzed/spicedb

Docker users can run the latest SpiceDB container with the following:

docker run --rm -p 50051:50051 authzed/spicedb serve --grpc-preshared-key "somerandomkeyhere"

SpiceDB containers use Chainguard Images to ship the bare minimum userspace which is a huge boon to security, but can complicate debugging. If you want to execute a user session into a running SpiceDB container and install packages, you can use one of our debug images.

Appending -debug to any tag will provide you an image that has a userspace with debug tooling:

docker run --rm -ti --entrypoint sh authzed/spicedb:latest-debug

Containers are also available for each git commit to the main branch under ${REGISTRY}/authzed/spicedb-git:${COMMIT}.

Deploying to Kubernetes

Production Kubernetes users should be relying on a stable release of the SpiceDB Operator. The Operator enforces not only best practices, but orchestrates SpiceDB updates without downtime.

If you're only experimenting, feel free to try out one of our community-maintained examples for testing SpiceDB on Kubernetes:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/authzed/examples/main/kubernetes/example.yaml

You can try both SpiceDB and zed entirely in your browser on the playground thanks to the power of WebAssembly.

If you don't want to start with the examples loadable from the Playground, you can follow a guide for developing a schema or review the the schema language design documentation.

To get a quick idea of schema development, you can watch the creators of SpiceDB writing a schema for GitHub:

Trying out the API

For debugging or getting started, we recommend installing zed, the official command-line client. The Playground also has a tab for experimenting with zed all from within your browser.

When it's time to write code, we recommend using one of the existing client libraries whether it's official or community-maintained.

Because every millisecond counts, we recommend using libraries that leverage the gRPC API for production workloads.

To get an understanding of integrating an application with SpiceDB, you can follow the Protecting Your First App guide or review API documentation on the Buf Registry or Postman.

Acknowledgements

SpiceDB is a community project fueled by contributions from both organizations and individuals. We appreciate all contributions, large and small, and would like to thank all those involved.

In addition, we'd like to highlight a few notable contributions:

• The GitHub Authorization Team for implementing and contributing the MySQL datastore
• The Netflix Authorization Team for sponsoring and being a design partner for Caveats