Install notarum

notarum ships as a single Docker image with no external services required. The binary is static, weighs about 38 MB and embeds everything: the reader, the API, the MCP server and the OpenAPI contract.

Requirements

Docker

The supported path. Nothing else to install: no runtime, no build step, no CDN.

Somewhere to keep the data

A mounted volume, or a Postgres database. Without one of the two, everything is lost on the next redeploy — see below.

About 1 GB of RAM

Only if you turn on the national search index, which holds 428,000 norms in memory. Without it, far less.

Run it

Postgres (recommended)

Postgres is the better choice for two reasons: nothing is written to disk, so backups are your database’s problem and already solved; and bulk writes go in batches, which matters when a sync writes over a million rows.

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 \
  -e NOTARUM_ALMACEN=postgres \
  -e NOTARUM_POSTGRES_DSN='postgres://user:pass@host:5432/notarum?sslmode=disable' \
  -e NOTARUM_ADMIN_USUARIO=you@example.com \
  -e NOTARUM_ADMIN_CLAVE='a long password of your own' \
  ghcr.io/diegoparras/notarum:latest

Any Postgres 13+ with contrib works — unaccent and to_tsvector('spanish', …) are what make accent-insensitive search work. The pgvector/pgvector:pg17 image is a good pick: it is built on the official image, so it brings both.

SQLite

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 \
  -v notarum-datos:/datos \
  -e NOTARUM_ALMACEN=sqlite \
  -e NOTARUM_ADMIN_USUARIO=you@example.com \
  -e NOTARUM_ADMIN_CLAVE='a long password of your own' \
  ghcr.io/diegoparras/notarum:latest

The volume is not optional

Without a mounted volume the container’s filesystem is discarded on every redeploy: your accounts, tokens and catalogs go with it. Everything appears to work until the next deploy. The panel tells you which case you are in — it records a mark on first boot and looks for it on every start.

Disk

The simplest engine, for trying it out. It serves by date but does not index, so full-text search asks the Gazette instead of answering locally.

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v notarum-datos:/datos \
  ghcr.io/diegoparras/notarum:latest

Open http://localhost:8080 and you are reading today’s Gazette.

First run

1. Sign in with the admin account from your environment variables. If you did not set a password, one is generated and printed once in the log.

2. Open the panel at /admin. Check what it says about storage: on a fresh volume it will say it started empty, which is correct the first time. If it says the same after a redeploy, your data is not being kept.

3. Sync the catalogs. Sync InfoLEG takes a few minutes and brings the 428,000 national norms plus the amendment relationships. Download provincial law takes seconds.

4. Fill in the Gazette for the period you care about. With the text of each notice it takes much longer — it is one request per notice, at the rate the Gazette tolerates — but it is what makes search reach the body and not just the summary.

5. Create a token from your account, for the API and the MCP.

From then on it runs itself: the catalogs refresh daily and the Gazette downloads a full week every Saturday at 4 AM.

Configuration

Everything has a sensible default. These are the ones that matter:

Variable	What it does
NOTARUM_ALMACEN	disco, sqlite or postgres
NOTARUM_POSTGRES_DSN	Full connection string, or use the separate _HOST, _BASE, _USUARIO, _CLAVE pieces
NOTARUM_ADMIN_USUARIO / _CLAVE	The account that administers. Setting the password here means you can always get back in
NOTARUM_ACCESO	abierto, mixto or cerrado. Also changeable from the panel, live
NOTARUM_BUSCADOR_INFOLEG	Turns on national search. Costs about 480 MB of memory, so it is opt-in
NOTARUM_ACTUALIZAR_A_LAS	When the catalogs refresh. Default 05:00
NOTARUM_BOLETIN_A_LAS	When the weekly Gazette download runs. Default 04:00, Saturdays
NOTARUM_ZONA	Time zone for those hours. Default America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires
NOTARUM_MEMORIA_MAX	A ceiling like 1GB. Read from the container if not set
NOTARUM_AUTH	federado delegates sign-in to Lockatus, alongside the local form

Yes/no variables understand 1/0, si/no, true/false and on/off.

Changing engines

Switching from SQLite to Postgres does not mean downloading the catalogs again:

notarum migrar --origen sqlite --db /datos/notarum.db

Run it with the new engine’s configuration in place and the old one as the source. Expired entries are not carried over, and the search index is rebuilt rather than translated.