carbon

Does the world need another ERP?

We built Carbon after years of building end-to-end manufacturing systems with off-the-shelf solutions. We realized that:

• Modern, API-first tooling didn't exist
• Vendor lock-in bordered on extortion
• There is no "perfect ERP" because each company is unique

We built Carbon to solve these problems ☝️

Architecture

Carbon is designed to make it easy for you to extend the platform by building your own apps through our API. We provide some examples to get you started in the examples folder.

Features:

• ERP
• MES
• QMS
• Custom Fields
• Nested BoM
• Traceability
• MRP
• Configurator
• MCP Client/Server
• API
• Webhooks
• Accounting
• Capacity Planning
• Simulation
• Full Roadmap

Technical highlights:

• Unified auth and permissions across apps
• Full-stack type safety (Database → UI)
• Realtime database subscriptions
• Attribute-based access control (ABAC)
• Role-based access control (Customer, Supplier, Employee)
• Row-level security (RLS)
• Composable user groups
• Dependency graph for operations
• Third-party integrations

Techstack

• React Router – framework
• Typescript – language
• Tailwind – styling
• Radix UI - behavior
• Supabase - database
• Supabase – auth
• Redis - cache
• Inngest - jobs
• Resend – email
• Lingui - i18n
• Vercel – hosting
• Stripe - billing

Codebase

The monorepo follows the Turborepo convention of grouping packages into one of two folders.

1. /apps for applications
2. /packages for shared code

/apps

pnpm dev runs the per-worktree dev CLI (crbn up). ERP and MES are first-class — the CLI boots the docker stack, applies migrations, regenerates types/swagger, and spawns the selected apps behind portless. Academy and starter are standalone Turborepo entries.

/packages

Development

Setup

1. Clone the repo into a public GitHub repository (or fork https://github.com/crbnos/carbon/fork). If want to make the repo private, you should acquire a commercial license to comply with the AGPL license.

   git clone https://github.com/crbnos/carbon.git
   

2. Go to the project folder

   cd carbon
   

Make sure that you have Docker installed on your system since this monorepo uses the Docker for local development.

In addition you must configure the following external services:

Posthog has a free tier which should be plenty to support local development. If you're self hosting and you don't want to use Posthog, it's pretty easy to remove the analytics.

Installation

First download and initialize the repository dependencies.

This repo uses pnpm as its package manager. Enable Corepack so the correct pnpm version (pinned via packageManager in package.json) is used automatically:

$ corepack enable    # one-time: activates pnpm shim from packageManager field

Then install dependencies:

$ nvm use            # use node v22
$ pnpm install       # install dependencies

The dev stack (Postgres, GoTrue, Kong, Storage, Inngest, Inbucket, Studio, Realtime) is booted later by crbn up — see Local dev CLI below. There is no separate "start the database" step.

Local dev CLI (crbn)

crbn is a small CLI at packages/dev/bin/crbn that wraps two things:

• Git worktrees — every feature branch can live in its own checkout dir, so you can switch branches without stashing.
• Per-worktree docker compose stack — each worktree gets its own Postgres / Supabase services on dynamic ports, isolated under carbon-<slug> compose project. Routing is handled by portless (a local HTTPS reverse proxy that serves *.dev hostnames on :443 with locally-trusted certs — installed automatically on first crbn up).

Windows users: the dev CLI (crbn, setup.sh) is POSIX-only and expects WSL or Git Bash. Native cmd.exe / PowerShell shells are not supported. From a WSL/Git Bash prompt, the standard flow (./setup.sh, pnpm dev, crbn checkout …) works the same as on macOS/Linux.

Run setup.sh once to put crbn on your $PATH and install the crbn shell function (so crbn checkout can change cwd):

$ ./setup.sh                   # writes a sentinel block to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.zshrc              # or open a new shell
$ crbn                         # shows commands

Common flows:

$ crbn checkout sid/cool-thing       # cd into worktree (creates if missing,
                                     # auto-fetches from origin if needed)
$ crbn checkout -b feat/new-thing    # new branch off origin/main + worktree
$ crbn checkout sid/cool-thing --up  # …and boot the stack inside it
$ crbn checkout 760                  # fetch GitHub PR #760 into a `pr-760`
                                     # branch + worktree (fork PRs work too)
$ crbn copy                          # re-sync .env from main checkout
$ crbn up | down | reset | status    # per-worktree compose stack
$ crbn new | list | remove           # interactive worktree management

crbn up flags:

• --no-migrate — skip supabase migration up (use when schema is already current and you just want to re-boot containers fast)
• --no-regen — skip regenerating packages/database/src/types.ts + swagger-docs-schema.ts (auto-skipped when --no-migrate is set, since no schema change implies no type drift)

Files synced by crbn copy are listed under package.json#crbn.copy (defaults to [".env"]). To uninstall the rc block: ./setup.sh --uninstall.

Create an .env file and copy the contents of .env.example