Fancy

Paste data. Get a fancy API.

Fancy turns a table you paste, a CSV you drop, or a declarative YAML/JSON file into a live, queryable REST API in minutes — filtering, sorting, pagination, and full-text search included, with an OpenAPI doc generated for free. It started from a simple problem: an app with nowhere to store its data shouldn't need a backend project to get one. Every API also gets an MCP endpoint, so an AI agent can read and write records the same way a person edits a spreadsheet — no custom integration code required. Self-hostable with one docker compose up.

Repo: github.com/carmelosantana/fancy-api

Screenshots

Dashboard — your APIs, at a glance.

Create an API — paste a table, get a schema.

Instant success — live endpoints, a write token, ready to use.

Query playground — build a filtered request and see the response.

Install

Docker (recommended)

cp .env.example .env
make up

Open http://localhost:3000 and log in with the ADMIN_PASSWORD from your .env (defaults to change-me — change it before exposing this beyond your own machine).

The container seeds a demo API, hello-tony, on first start. Try it:

curl http://localhost:3000/api/hello-tony/quotes/random

make logs   # follow the web service
make down   # stop the stack (data persists in the fancy-data volume)

Local dev

make install   # pnpm install
make seed      # populate the hello-tony demo against ./data/app.db
make dev       # next dev on http://localhost:3000

Deploying somewhere else

Running Dokploy or Coolify (or anything Docker-based)? See Deploy on Dokploy / Coolify below.

The four ways to create an API

From /admin/new, pick one:

1. Paste table — paste tab- or comma-separated rows (e.g. straight out of a spreadsheet); Fancy infers column names and types.

2. Upload CSV — drop a .csv file.

3. Paste CSV — paste raw CSV text.

4. Import declarative file — paste a YAML or JSON spec that fully describes the api, its collection(s), and their schema + records.

A minimal declarative file looks like this:

slug: hello-tony
name: Hello Tony Quotes
collections:
  - slug: quotes
    name: Quotes
    schema:
      - { name: author, type: string }
      - { name: text, type: string }
      - { name: year, type: number }
      - { name: topic, type: string }
    records:
      - author: Winston Churchill
        text: "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
        year: 1941
        topic: perseverance

schema[].type is one of string, number, boolean, date. Any api can be exported back to this same shape from its detail page — the declarative file is a portable import/export format, not the runtime store (see Architecture).

Query syntax

Every collection gets a read API at /api/{api}/{collection}, plus /{id}, /random, and an OpenAPI document at /api/{api}/openapi.json. Responses are shaped { data, meta: { total, limit, offset } } (a single object, no meta, for /{id} and /random).

Examples against the seeded hello-tony demo:

# List, filtered and sorted
curl "http://localhost:3000/api/hello-tony/quotes?topic=perseverance&sort=-year"

# Pagination
curl "http://localhost:3000/api/hello-tony/quotes?limit=5&offset=10"

# Free-text search
curl "http://localhost:3000/api/hello-tony/quotes?q=courage"

# One random record — handy for a "quote of the day" widget
curl "http://localhost:3000/api/hello-tony/quotes/random"

# A single record by id
curl "http://localhost:3000/api/hello-tony/quotes/1"

# OpenAPI document for the whole api
curl "http://localhost:3000/api/hello-tony/openapi.json"

Writing data with AI agents (MCP)

Every api gets a write-capable MCP endpoint at /api/mcp/{api}, served over Streamable HTTP. Read-only tools work without a token; the four mutating tools require the api's write token, sent as Authorization: Bearer <writeToken>. The token is shown once when the api is created and can be rotated from its detail page in /admin at any time.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hello-tony": {
      "url": "http://localhost:3000/api/mcp/hello-tony",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <writeToken>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Tools exposed:

Self-hosting

• Persistence — the sqlite database lives at DATABASE_PATH inside the container (default /data/app.db), backed by the named fancy-data Docker volume. make down stops the stack without touching it; make clean deletes it (with a confirmation prompt).

• Admin password — set ADMIN_PASSWORD in .env before first start. Fancy has a single admin credential, no multi-user accounts (v1).

• Ports — the container listens on 3000; the compose file maps it to 3000 on the host. Change the left side of the ports: mapping in docker-compose.yml to use a different host port.

• Seeding — SEED_ON_START=1 (the default) seeds the hello-tony demo on every start; it's idempotent, so this is safe to leave on. Set it to 0 for a blank instance.

Deploy on Dokploy / Coolify

Fancy is a single Docker container plus one sqlite file, which maps cleanly onto either platform. Two supported paths:

Option A — Dockerfile app (recommended)

Point the platform at this repo (or a fork) and let it build Dockerfile directly — no compose file needed.

1. App type: "Dockerfile" / "Application from Git", build context = repo root, dockerfile path = Dockerfile.

2. Port: the container listens on 3000 — tell the platform to route to that port.

3. Volume — required: attach a persistent volume mounted at /data. The sqlite database lives at /data/app.db; without a persistent mount at that path, every redeploy starts from an empty database. This is the single most important setting for either platform.

4. Environment: set the variables from the table below.

5. Domain: add a domain and enable HTTPS (see the HTTPS note below).

Option B — Docker Compose

Point the platform at docker-compose.yml and let it deploy the web service as-is.

1. Set the same environment variables (below) on the web service.

2. Map your domain to service web, container port 3000.

3. The ports: mapping in docker-compose.yml (${WEB_PORT:-3000}:3000) is there for local docker compose up convenience — on a PaaS the platform's reverse proxy talks to the container directly over its internal network, so publishing a host port is usually unnecessary and can conflict with other stacks. The domain/proxy feature is what actually exposes the app publicly; the fancy-data named volume still provides the persistent /data mount either way.

Required environment

HTTPS note

Session cookies are marked Secure in production, so the app must be served over HTTPS — the browser will silently drop the cookie otherwise and login won't persist. Both Dokploy and Coolify default to a Traefik + Let's Encrypt domain setup that handles this for you; if you instead hit the app over plain HTTP by bare IP, expect to be logged out on every navigation.

Scaling note

Fancy's storage is a single sqlite file (via libsql), not a networked database — run one instance only. Multiple replicas pointed at the same /data volume will corrupt or race on writes.

Deploy on Vercel (with self-hosted libsql)

Vercel's filesystem is ephemeral (no persistent /data volume), so the Docker/local-file mode above doesn't apply there. Instead, Fancy can connect to a remote libsql database — the same SQLite engine, just reached over HTTP(S) instead of a local file. The query builder, repo, ingest, and MCP layers don't change at all; only the connection does.

1. Run a libsql server somewhere reachable over HTTPS

sqld (the libsql server) is a single lightweight process — self-host it on any small always-on VPS (or use a hosted libsql provider like Turso). This repo includes docker-compose.sqld.yml for the self-hosted route:

docker compose -f docker-compose.sqld.yml up -d

By default it listens with no auth (fine for a private network or while wiring things up) on the host port 8899. For a production deploy, put it behind a TLS-terminating reverse proxy and enable JWT auth — see the commented SQLD_AUTH_JWT_KEY guidance in that compose file — so you can connect with a libsql:// URL + bearer token instead of plain http://.

2. Configure the Vercel project

This is a pnpm monorepo (apps/web + packages/core). The simplest setup:

• In the Vercel project's Settings → General → Root Directory, set it to apps/web. Vercel auto-detects Next.js there and installs the pnpm workspace from the repo root on its own (it walks up to find pnpm-workspace.yaml), so packages/core is resolved correctly without any extra build-command overrides.

• If you'd rather not use the Root Directory setting (e.g. you want to keep deploying from the repo root for some other reason), a minimal vercel.json at the repo root with "buildCommand": "pnpm --filter web build" and "outputDirectory": "apps/web/.next" (plus "installCommand": "pnpm install") achieves the same thing — but Root Directory is less to maintain, so this repo doesn't ship one.

3. Required environment variables

Vercel serves everything over HTTPS by default, so the Secure session cookie (see AGENTS.md) works out of the box — no HTTPS caveat to manage here like the bare-IP case in the Dokploy/Coolify section above.

4. Seed once

Unlike the Docker image (which can seed on every container start), a Vercel deployment has no "on start" hook against a remote DB. Seed it once from your machine, pointed at the same database:

DATABASE_URL=libsql://your-host DATABASE_AUTH_TOKEN=your-token pnpm seed

Honesty check / things to confirm on your own deploy

• The local-file mode is completely unaffected by any of this — nothing above changes DATABASE_PATH behavior, Docker, or make up.

• next.config.ts's output: "standalone" is harmless on Vercel — Vercel builds Next.js natively and ignores standalone output, so no config change is needed there.

• middleware.ts runs on the Node.js runtime (runtime: "nodejs") because lib/auth.ts uses node:crypto, which the default Edge middleware runtime doesn't support. This should work unmodified on Vercel, but Node-runtime middleware has had a narrower rollout than Edge middleware — this hasn't been verified against an actual Vercel deployment, so confirm /admin and /api/_manage/* auth still gate correctly on your first deploy.

• No Vercel deploy was performed as part of this change — the config above is written correct-by-construction from Vercel's documented monorepo behavior, not verified against a live deployment.

Architecture

Monorepo, two packages:

• packages/core — the engine: ingest (CSV/paste/declarative-file parsing + type inference), the generic JSON-column record store, the query builder, the declarative import/export spec, and the MCP tool definitions. Framework-agnostic and meant to be reusable outside this Next.js app.

• apps/web — the Next.js (App Router) binding: the admin builder UI, the public read API, the management API, and the MCP HTTP route.

Storage today is SQLite (via drizzle-orm/libsql + @libsql/client) — the query layer is built directly on SQLite's json_extract. It runs either as a local file (DATABASE_PATH, the Docker/localhost default) or against a remote libsql database (DATABASE_URL + DATABASE_AUTH_TOKEN — a self-hosted sqld or Turso, for ephemeral-FS hosts like Vercel; see Deploy on Vercel above) — it's the same engine and protocol either way, so nothing downstream changes. Postgres is a roadmap item, not a working option yet (see docker-compose.yml's commented-out db service and the design spec below); switching backends will need query-layer changes, not just a connection string.

The declarative file (YAML/JSON) is a portable import/export format for moving an api's shape + data in and out of Fancy. The database is the runtime source of truth — the file is a snapshot, not something Fancy reads from at request time.

Development

Run make (or make help) to print this from the terminal.

Testing

• Unit (make test / pnpm test) — 99 Vitest tests over packages/core and apps/web: ingest/type-inference, the query builder, the record repo, spec import/export, auth token handling, and the MCP tool definitions.

• End-to-end (make e2e / pnpm e2e) — 8 Playwright specs driving the real app: creating an api from a pasted table, the query playground, MCP round-trips, and more.

Contributing

Design constraints and the decisions behind them live in AGENTS.md — read it before making changes (human or agent).

License

AGPL-3.0. If you run a modified version of Fancy as a network service, the AGPL requires you to make your modified source available to users of that service.