chancela

Chancela

Chancela is a self-hostable livro de atas (minute book) and corporate-acts platform. It keeps meeting minutes and related corporate records in an append-only, hash-chained ledger, integrates Portuguese qualified e-signature rails, and produces verifiable export/import bundles with per-file fixity — so a record’s integrity can be checked independently of the running system.

It runs as three editions from one codebase: a desktop app (Tauri, offline single-user), a self-hosted web/API server (single-node SQLite or a Postgres durability backend), and an optional MCP server for AI-assisted drafting under the same permissions and audit trail.

!!! warning “What Chancela is — and is not” Chancela records, seals, and helps you verify documents. It does not, on its own, confer legal validity on any document. Legal effect depends on Portuguese and EU law and on how you operate the tool — not on the software alone. Nothing here is legal advice.

Start here

- :material-rocket-launch: **[Deployment](/chancela/deployment.html)** Run it: single-node SQLite, the Postgres + Redis profile, the hardened variant, and multi-node. - :material-cog: **[Configuration](/chancela/configuration.html)** Environment variables, docker secrets, and the in-app Settings sections. - :material-shape-outline: **[Capabilities](/chancela/capabilities.html)** Minute-book lifecycle, the ledger, e-signatures, RBAC, templates, exports, and clients. - :material-server: **[Requirements](/chancela/requirements.html)** Host resources, software versions, and client/browser requirements. - :material-scale-balance: **[Comparison](/chancela/comparison.html)** How Chancela compares with adjacent tools (sourced, with an honesty caveat). - :material-shield-lock: **[Security & Hardening](/chancela/security/hardened-docker.html)** The hardened, distroless, non-root container images and operations security. - :material-key-alert: **[Authorization changes](/chancela/security/authorization-changes.html)** Which roles lose access in a release, and how an operator restores it deliberately. Read before upgrading an existing install. - :material-toolbox: **[Extras](/chancela/extras.html)** Backups, timestamping, reverse proxy/TLS, monitoring, SBOM/scanning, and the law-corpus review workflow.

Honest positioning

• Self-host first. You run it on your own host; your records stay on infrastructure you control.
• Tamper-evident, not tamper-proof. The ledger is a global spine plus per-application/company/book chains. Any break is detected on boot and the server drops to a read-only degraded mode until it is repaired or restored.
• Portuguese qualified e-signature integration. Chave Móvel Digital (CMD), Cartão de Cidadão (CC), CSC/QTSP cloud signing, and local PKCS#12 — behind a fail-closed trust gate. Chancela integrates these rails; it is not itself a qualified trust service provider.
• Verifiable fixity. Book export/import and preservation packages carry per-file SHA-256 and a bundle digest; imports are verified before trust and quarantined on any mismatch.
• Honest about limits. Single-writer by design; the law corpus separates human-Verified text from automated-review and pending entries; the docs flag where a guarantee is weaker than it looks.

This site is open source. Improve this page.