What Chest is

Chest is a document library for the records a business has to get right: supplier certificates, customer agreements, project evidence and the rest. It keeps every original, shows everyone which version is the approved one, and records who decided what. It is free and open source under the MIT licence, and you run it yourself.

How a document moves through Chest

1. File it. Someone uploads the original and files it: a title, a collection, a document type with its fields, a responsible owner, a reviewer, and optionally the supplier, customer or project it belongs to. See File and find documents.
2. Approve the exact version. The assigned reviewer opens the record and records Approve this exact version. That version becomes the current approved one. See Versions and approval.
3. Replace it when a new one arrives. A replacement adds a new version. Everyone keeps opening the approved one until the reviewer approves the new version; the earlier version stays, with its decisions.
4. Keep the dates. A review date and an expiry date put the record on the library's Review and expiry work list when it is due. See Review and expiry dates.

Who sees what

Access comes from roles: reader, editor and reviewer, granted to a person or a group, on a collection or on one document. Lists, counts, search, previews and downloads all follow the current grants, so removing someone ends their access everywhere at once. See People and access.

What Chest keeps

• Every original exactly as uploaded, with its filename, size and SHA-256 fingerprint.
• Every version and every decision on it: comments, requested changes, approvals and reviewer assignments, each with who and when.
• Completed reviews and expiries with their evidence.
• An audit trail of every change. Nothing is deleted automatically; trash is reversible.

One export holds all of it, and restores into a fresh Chest. See Backup and restore.

What it does not do

Chest previews PDFs and images in the browser and shows text files as plain text; other formats download. It does not edit or render Office files, read text out of scanned PDFs or images, sync folders to computers or phones, or share records by public link. Originals are limited to 8 MB each.

Next

Run Chest on your computer, then set up your library.