Athenut

Privacy-preserving paid web search using Cashu ecash.

This is a monorepo producing one binary: the mint serves the Cashu/search API and the web frontend from the same axum server.

• athenut-mint/ — Cashu mint and search API (axum). Embeds the frontend dist at compile time via rust-embed (FRONTEND_DIST, default ../athenut-frontend/dist).
• athenut-frontend/ — Leptos (CSR) wallet/search UI, built with trunk. The wallet runs entirely in the browser.

The repository is also a Cargo workspace. athenut-mint is the default member so root cargo build/cargo check commands target the native binary by default. The frontend remains a workspace member for Rust tooling, but it is bundled for production with Trunk before being embedded into the mint binary.

Build

nix develop          # toolchain (rust + wasm target, trunk, protobuf, ...)
just build           # trunk build --release, then cargo build --release

Useful development checks:

cargo check                              # default workspace member: athenut-mint
cargo check -p athenut-frontend --target wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo test -p athenut-frontend

Or with nix directly:

nix build .#athenut-mint     # combined binary (default package)

Deploy (NixOS)

One module runs the whole thing:

{
  imports = [ athenut.nixosModules.default ];

  services.athenut-mint = {
    enable = true;
    configFile = "/run/secrets/athenut-mint.toml";
  };
}

Upgrading from the two-service setup

The mint now serves the frontend itself, so the old separate services.athenut-frontend is gone. When moving an existing host onto this repo:

• Remove the services.athenut-frontend block and its flake input.
• Repoint your reverse proxy at the mint's listen port — the UI and the API are now served from the same origin (the standalone frontend port, e.g. 3000, no longer exists).

services.athenut-mint keeps the same options, service name, user and state directory (/var/lib/athenut-mint), so the mint's on-disk database carries over. The binary also moves from the cdk 0.15 fork to cdk 0.17.0; cdk runs its own schema migrations on first start. Back up /var/lib/athenut-mint before the first upgrade.