Recall

Manually save exactly what you choose — a text selection or a full page — from Chrome, and browse everything you've saved, organized day by day, from a dashboard you can reach on any device. Nothing is captured unless you click "Save." Multi-user: anyone can sign up for their own account and gets a private, isolated archive.

Full requirements: recall-extension-requirements-v3.md. Operations, deployment, and incident runbooks: docs/OPERATIONS.md.

Architecture

[Chrome Extension] --HTTPS+JWT--> [Next.js on Vercel] --HTTPS+JWT--> [FastAPI on Railway] --> [Postgres]

• extension/ — Manifest V3 extension. Manual capture only (context menu selection save, popup full-page save, configurable keyboard shortcut), with a chrome.storage.local-backed retry queue and a sign-in/sign-up UI (email
  • password) instead of manually-entered tokens. See extension/.
• backend/ — FastAPI service deployed on Railway (Docker web service, railway.json config in backend/). Postgres-backed, per-user-scoped storage, JWT session tokens, password hashing, rate limiting, structured logs. See backend/README.md.
• frontend/ — Next.js dashboard on Vercel. Day view, 30-day activity heatmap, search, delete, email+password sign-in, server-side API proxy so no backend secret ever reaches the browser. See frontend/README.md.

Repo layout

recall/
  extension/     Chrome extension (TypeScript, esbuild)
  backend/       FastAPI backend (Python), deployed on Railway
  frontend/      Next.js dashboard (TypeScript), deployed on Vercel
  .github/workflows/   CI: extension build/lint/typecheck/test/package,
                       backend pytest, frontend lint/build/Playwright

CI/CD

Workflow	Triggers on	Does
extension-build.yml	changes under extension/	typecheck, lint, unit tests, build, packages a versioned .zip artifact
backend-test.yml	changes under backend/	pytest, Docker build smoke test
frontend-test.yml	changes under frontend/ or backend/	lint, build, spins up the backend locally (SQLite) and runs Playwright against it

Vercel auto-deploys previews per PR and promotes to production on merge to main. Railway also auto-deploys the backend on push to main (the GitHub App's repo access had silently dropped recall from its allowed repositories, which is what caused the "Auto deploy unavailable — could not load branches" state under Settings → Source; re-adding the repo at github.com/settings/installations restored it). If auto-deploy ever shows that error again, check the Railway App's repository access on GitHub first before assuming the connection itself needs to be redone.

One-time setup (secrets)

Each of Railway (DATABASE_URL, JWT_SECRET) and Vercel (BACKEND_URL) has its own env vars — no secret is shared between them or with the extension, since auth is now per-user (issued at signup/login), not a fixed shared token. See backend/README.md and frontend/README.md for exactly which variables go where.

Local development

Run all three independently:

# backend (needs a local Postgres, or point DATABASE_URL at sqlite+aiosqlite for quick testing)
cd backend && pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
DATABASE_URL=postgresql+asyncpg://localhost/recall JWT_SECRET=dev-secret uvicorn app.main:app --reload --port 8000
alembic upgrade head

# frontend (separate terminal)
cd frontend && npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # point BACKEND_URL at localhost:8000
npm run dev

# extension (separate terminal)
cd extension && npm install
npm run build   # then chrome://extensions -> Load unpacked -> extension/dist