Shipped vs planned

Fanout is pre-release. It is used in earnest, and it changes without migration paths. This page is the account of what that means per capability, so a reader does not have to infer it from how confidently a page is written.

Every documentation page carries one of three markers in its frontmatter, and the vocabulary is closed — a fourth value fails the build rather than quietly introducing a fourth kind of claim:

Marker	What it means
shipped	The binary on the current tag does this, and the shape is settled.
preview	It runs today, and its shape may still change without a migration path.
planned	Designed and written down. Nothing executes it yet.

The marker reaches an agent too: llms.txt annotates every non-shipped page inline, so something reading the index knows before it fetches the page.

Every page states its status explicitly rather than relying on the default. That is deliberate: shipped is the schema’s default, so a page that says nothing asserts stability by silence — which is the opposite of what a pre-release product should do. Most pages here are preview, and the reasons are concrete rather than cautious. In the week this documentation was written, the ingest header was replaced, FANOUT_MCP_PUBLIC_URL was removed outright, namespace query scoping inverted, and viewer gained the ability to run the agent. Pages describing those surfaces are marked accordingly.

shipped is reserved for what has not moved and is not expected to: what Fanout is, the release and install mechanics, and backing up the data directory.

Where each capability stands

Capability	Status	Notes
OTLP ingest over gRPC and HTTP	shipped	Both listeners, one ingest token.
Parquet storage and DuckDB queries	shipped	Local data directory; no external database.
Browser client	preview	Ships in the binary; surfaces still moving.
Chat investigator	preview	Requires an AI provider key; disabled and logged without one.
MCP tools	preview	Served at /mcp; the tool set is not frozen.
Alerts	preview	Rules evaluate on an interval against rollups.
Local email sign-in	shipped	Codes by email; no passwords.
Local self-signup	preview	FANOUT_SELF_SIGNUP, off by default. Provisions viewers after code verification only.
OIDC viewer auto-provisioning	preview	Verified identities admitted as viewers without a shared credential.
OIDC sign-in	shipped	Provider flow, with group and domain mapping.
Generated settings reference	shipped	cmd/fanout-docgen writes it; just check fails when it drifts from the type.
Release checksums and provenance	shipped	SHA256SUMS plus GitHub build attestations on every archive.
Published throughput figure	planned	Withdrawn before release; the standard a new one must meet is on Performance.
Signatures and SBOM	planned	Deliberately deferred until something consumes them.
Guides for every operational task	preview	The query surface — what the browser client actually shows — has no page yet.
Namespace scoping on alert rules	planned	The field is stored but evaluation ignores it; scope with service.

What “no migration path” means in practice

It means what it says. A storage-format change may require starting from an empty data directory, and a renamed setting is renamed rather than aliased. The configuration loader rejects unrecognised FANOUT_-prefixed variables, so a setting that has moved surfaces as a refusal to start rather than as a silently ignored value — which is the one guarantee that makes the rest survivable.

Do not run a Fanout instance as the only copy of data you need to keep.