Skip to main content

The Circus Component Map

This is the high-level component view of the platform: how the frontend, the backend layers, the database, the plugin surface, the workflow engine, external providers, and storage relate — and how a request flows between them. It is reproduced faithfully from the core component diagram.

Orientation​

A few things to read off it:

  • Frontend → Operator API carries the operator JWT; the Machine API (/api/machine) is a separate surface the engine's Circus nodes call with an API-Key JWT.
  • The plugin surface is two subgraphs: plugin-owned tables and the four extension points the core calls. Note the direction of every arrow between plugin and core tables — plugin tables reference core tables, never the reverse.
  • Engine integration is three labelled edges: webhook dispatch (per-engine HS256 JWT) out to n8n, machine callbacks (Bearer workflow JWT) back in, and remote stop / status (X-N8N-API-KEY) from both the API and the reconciler.
  • Storage connects to n8n, not to the API — the platform orchestrates media production but doesn't touch object storage itself.

For the underlying data model, see the Core ER Diagram; for how a plugin clips on, the Plugin ER Diagram.