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What is Hive?

The plain-language introduction to Hive: what it is, the problem it solves, and who it is for. Written for people who use the Apiary, not people who build it.

What is Hive?

The plain-language introduction to Hive: what it is, the problem it solves, and who it is for. Written for people who use the Apiary, not people who build it.

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#The problem: a stack of services is a chore to look at

The Apiary runs several services on your machine, each on its own port: Honeycomb for memory, Nectar for codebase understanding, and Doctor for supervision. Individually they are clean. Together they are a chore: several ports to remember, and browser tabs each talking to a different address. Worse, the old dashboard lived inside the memory service, so it went dark exactly when you needed it, when that service was down.

#The idea: one front door

Hive is the single portal you open. One always-on address, http://127.0.0.1:3853, serves the entire dashboard for everything behind it: memories, projects, the memory graph, the code graph, sync, logs, ROI, and settings. You bookmark one address and never hunt for a port again.

#What you actually get

  • One address for everything. Every dashboard page in the Apiary lives at one origin.
  • Always on. Hive is its own supervised process, so it starts on boot, restarts itself on a crash, and is the last thing standing when something else is down.
  • Never a broken page. On a cold boot you get an honest readiness screen with one tile per service, and you land on the dashboard the moment the stack is ready.
  • Fails soft. If one service is down, its panel says so while the rest of the dashboard keeps working, and it recovers on its own.
  • Holds nothing. Hive stores no token and no data of its own. It passes your session through to the services that own your data.
  • Local only. It binds to your machine, with no way to expose it to the network.

#How it feels day to day

You open one bookmark. A live status pill for each service sits at the top of every page, drawn as distinct shapes so it reads without color. If a panel is quiet because a service is restarting, the rest of the page keeps working and the panel comes back on its own once Doctor brings the service up.

#Who it is for

  • Anyone with an Apiary install who wants one place to view memories, projects, graphs, sync, logs, ROI, and settings.
  • Operators diagnosing which service is unhappy, without remoting into terminals.

#Where it fits

Hive is the window into the whole stack. Honeycomb, Nectar, and Doctor do the work; Hive shows all of it in one place and stays up even when one of them is not.

#Next steps