July 6, 2026guideentries/life-app-overview.md

Life Archive App Overview

Life Archive App is the open-source reference web application for the Life Archive Format. It reads a .life folder from the local filesystem and presents the archive as a public, searchable website.

The app and the archive have separate responsibilities:

The archive owns the stories, metadata, relationships, photographs, and files.
The app reads that material and supplies navigation, page layouts, search, themes, translations, metadata, thumbnails, and web-friendly asset routes.

The app does not move archive content into a database and does not rewrite the archive while serving it. This keeps the original Markdown and media portable: the same folder can be backed up, versioned, edited with ordinary tools, or rendered by another LAF-compatible application.

What the app renders

Given a valid archive, the app provides:

a home page shaped by the archive title, hero image, featured collections, albums, and recent entries;
chronological entry lists and individual Markdown entry pages;
collection lists and board-style collection pages;
album lists, responsive photo layouts, and a full-screen photo viewer;
an About page rendered from the archive's README.md;
server-rendered text search across archive items;
archive-aware links to entries, collections, files, and album media;
archive metadata, favicon, sitemap, and robots responses;
selectable visual themes and interface languages.

Navigation adapts to the archive. For example, the Albums link is omitted when the selected archive has no albums.

Read-only source, generated cache

Archive content is treated as read-only. The app may generate resized album thumbnails, but those files are placed under the configured app system directory—.laf-system by default—not inside the .life folder.

The app also keeps an in-memory index of an archive. It compares file paths, sizes, and modification times on later requests, so normal edits are detected without requiring a content database.

One app, one or many archives

The simplest deployment serves one archive at every route. A single running app can also map different hostnames to different archive folders, allowing sites such as family.example.com and travel.example.com to share the same application process while displaying separate archives.

This is hostname-based multi-tenancy, not account-based multi-tenancy. The app does not include sign-in, an administrative dashboard, or browser editing. Archive owners manage the source folders and deployment environment directly.

Read order

Project status: The app and LAF specification are under active development. Check the repository and the documentation shipped with the version you deploy before relying on a setting or behavior.