Quick Start
-This tutorial walks you through a complete workflow: creating an identity, building a tessera from files, verifying it, and exporting it.
-1. Initialize your identity
-First, set up your local identity and database:
-tes init
-Generated Ed25519 identity
-Database initialized
-Config written to /home/user/.tesseras/config.toml
-Tesseras initialized at /home/user/.tesseras
-This creates:
--
-
~/.tesseras/identity/— your Ed25519 keypair
-~/.tesseras/db/— SQLite database for indexing
-~/.tesseras/blobs/— storage for memory files
-~/.tesseras/config.toml— configuration file
-
2. Prepare your files
-Create a directory with the memories you want to preserve:
-mkdir my-memories
-cp ~/photos/family-dinner.jpg my-memories/
-cp ~/photos/garden.jpg my-memories/
-echo "A warm Sunday afternoon with the family." > my-memories/reflection.txt
-Supported formats: .jpg, .jpeg, .png (images), .wav (audio), .webm (video), .txt (text).
3. Preview with dry run
-See what would be included without creating anything:
-tes create my-memories --dry-run
-4. Create a tessera
-tes create my-memories --tags "family,sunday" --location "Home"
-The output includes the content hash — a 64-character hex string that uniquely identifies your tessera. Copy it for the next steps.
-5. List your tesseras
-tes list
-Hash Created Memories Size Visibility
-9f2c4a1b3e7d8f0c 2026-02-14 3 284 KB public
-6. Verify integrity
-Use the content hash to verify that all files are intact and the signature is valid:
-tes verify 9f2c4a1b3e7d8f0c...
-Tessera: 9f2c4a1b3e7d8f0c...
-Signature: VALID
- [OK] memories/a1b2c3/media.jpg
- [OK] memories/d4e5f6/media.jpg
- [OK] memories/g7h8i9/media.txt
-Verification: PASSED
-7. Export a self-contained copy
-Export the tessera to a directory that can be read without Tesseras:
-tes export 9f2c4a1b3e7d8f0c... ./backup
-Exported to ./backup/tessera-9f2c4a1b3e7d8f0c...
-8. Inspect the export
-The exported directory is fully self-contained:
-tessera-9f2c4a1b3e7d8f0c.../
-├── MANIFEST # Plain text index with checksums
-├── README.decode # How to read this tessera without software
-├── identity/
-│ ├── creator.pub.ed25519 # Your public key
-│ └── signature.ed25519.sig # Signature of the MANIFEST
-├── memories/
-│ ├── <hash>/
-│ │ ├── media.jpg # The photo
-│ │ ├── context.txt # Description in plain text
-│ │ └── meta.json # Structured metadata
-│ └── .../
-└── decode/
- ├── formats.txt # Explanation of all formats used
- ├── jpeg.txt # How to decode JPEG
- └── json.txt # How to decode JSON
-Everything a future reader needs to understand the contents is included in the directory itself — no Tesseras software required.
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