2.8 KiB
User Engine INTENT.md
Purpose
user-engine exists to provide a reusable, headless user domain service for applications, platforms, and repositories that need account, profile, preference, membership, and application-specific user attribute management without becoming tightly coupled to a single identity provider or UI.
Primary Utility
The project provides a canonical user layer that can be embedded in small standalone services and extended into multi-tenant, multi-application, and multi-team environments.
It manages:
- users and account state
- external identity links
- profile and preference data
- tenant, application, and team memberships
- application-registered customization attributes
- catalog-driven profile schemas
- profile projections for consuming applications
- lifecycle and profile-change events
Strategic Role
user-engine separates user-domain management from authentication, authorization, and application-specific UI concerns.
It is intended to integrate with established identity and access systems such as OIDC providers, SCIM provisioning sources, LDAP-compatible directories, and external authorization engines, while remaining useful in simple standalone deployments.
Intended Users
- application developers adding user/account functionality to a service
- platform teams managing users across multiple applications
- product teams needing self-service account and preference management
- operators and tenant administrators managing scoped user populations
- agentic systems that need structured access to user preferences and profile context
Product Boundaries
user-engine is the headless backend and domain service.
Related UI surfaces may be provided separately:
user-accountfor self-service account, profile, and preference management by the individual useruser-managerfor administrative and operational management of users in a tenant, application, team, or platform scope
user-engine does not aim to be a full identity provider, password/MFA system, or fine-grained authorization engine, though it may integrate with such systems.
Design Principles
- headless first
- optional UI, not UI-driven
- standalone-friendly
- enterprise-integratable
- identity-provider agnostic
- authorization-engine agnostic
- catalog-driven customization
- explicit ownership, visibility, mutability, and sensitivity of attributes
- layered profiles instead of one global metadata blob
- concrete user-domain focus with a possible future extraction path toward a generic profile engine
Success Definition
user-engine succeeds when a repository or application can add robust user-domain capabilities with minimal coupling, while still having a clear path from a simple local setup to a governed multi-tenant, multi-application deployment.