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.
+ +