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Mercatus Liber Documentation

Mercatus Liber Documentation

This is the documentation site for Mercatus Liber — a free, MIT-licensed, headless commerce framework built to be AI-agent- and human-accessible from the ground up. If you landed here from the framework’s own pitch page, this site is the other half: not “why Mercatus Liber,” but “how Mercatus Liber actually works, and how to run one.”

Start here

  • Getting started — the fastest way in: run one of the three live demo storefronts already seeded in this repo, or provision your own store with the create-store CLI.
  • Architecture — design principles, the subsystem map, repo shape, and the prime directive (no subsystem imports another subsystem’s internals).
  • Subsystem reference — one doc per subsystem (26 total), each covering purpose, dependencies, responsibilities, explicit non-responsibilities, and open questions. Browse the sidebar for the full list, from 00-core-schema through 25-storefront-views.
  • Planning corpus — the real design-discussion behind every epic this project has shipped: the actual reasoning, rejected alternatives, and evidence, not just conclusions. Browse the sidebar’s “planning” section for the full list.
  • Integrations — every real third-party system this framework talks to today (persistence, CMS, auth, payments, fulfillment & shipping, image/media, analytics & insights), with each one’s real current status and the exact env var(s) to turn it on.
  • Sample stores — the three real demo storefronts, their real URLs, their real per-store backends, and the honest current state of the in-progress move to give each one its own independent deployment.

What’s covered here vs. elsewhere

This site is generated from the same real, hand-written docs that live in this monorepo’s docs/ tree and root README.md — a build-time sync script copies them in so this site never drifts into a second, hand-maintained source of truth. Four pages here are genuinely new, written for this site specifically: this landing page, Getting started, Integrations, and Sample stores. Everything else — Architecture, the subsystem reference, and the full project README (status, license, why this project exists at all) — is synced straight from the repository. Loosely-structured, frequently-changing content — FAQ, troubleshooting, a decisions log — lives instead on the GitHub Wiki , linked from this site’s nav and footer, not duplicated here.

Status

Mercatus Liber is pre-alpha. See the project README for the current build-out status and what’s done so far.

Architecture — Mercatus Liber