Philterd Appliance

Warning

This project is under active development and is not ready for production use. Interfaces, service layout, ports and configuration all change without notice, and there is no upgrade path between revisions. Philter 4.0 is unreleased, so most components are still built from source rather than pulled from a registry. Treat it as a preview.

Philterd's open source PII and PHI tools assembled into one self-hosted box. Everything runs on a single machine, on your own infrastructure. No data leaves your boundary.

Documentation: https://philterd.github.io/philterd-appliance/

Quick start

make bootstrap   # generate .env and a TLS certificate
make build       # build the components that are not published yet
make up          # start the core profile

Then open https://localhost:8443/.

make bootstrap generates a self-signed certificate, so browsers warn on first use until it is trusted or replaced with one of your own.

What it runs

Product	Port	Role
Console	8443	Launcher and status view over the rest
Philter	8444	Redaction API and dashboard
Redaction Policy Editor	8445	Building and editing policies
Arbiter	8446	Human review of detected spans (full profile)
Philter Scope	8447	Scoring policies against a golden dataset
PhEye	internal	Detection models used by Philter

MongoDB and OpenSearch back the products that need them. An nginx proxy terminates TLS in front of everything, and is the only service that binds to the host.

make up        # core
make up-full   # everything, including Arbiter

How it is put together

bom.yaml is the single source of truth for what ships. Each component records its image reference and whether it is pulled from a registry or built locally, so an unpublished product sits alongside a published one with no special casing anywhere else.

make bom       # list components and their tiers
make doctor    # check that components resolve

Seven of ten components are built from source today, Philter among them. See Image publishing.

Documentation

Built with mkdocs from docs/, published to GitHub Pages on every push to main. To preview locally:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
mkdocs serve -f docs/mkdocs.yml

Contributing

Issues and roadmap are tracked in this repository. The appliance's outstanding work is collected in #2.

License

Copyright 2026 Philterd, LLC. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.