Introduction to Legend

Legend is a lightweight, self-hosted Knowledge Context Engine that helps teams discover, understand, and connect their internal systems and knowledge. Think of it as the navigational key for your organization’s ecosystem.

What Legend Does

In cartography, a legend explains what symbols mean, creating understanding from chaos. Legend does the same for your internal tools, services, and knowledge. It provides the context and connections that turn scattered resources into a coherent, navigable landscape.

Legend bridges the gap between simple dashboards and heavy enterprise portals by offering:

Contextual relationships that show how services, teams, and people connect
Intelligent discovery through relationship-aware search
Clear ownership and responsibility mapping
Unified access to documentation and deep links
Optional complexity that scales with your organizational needs

Who Benefits from Legend

Legend serves three primary audiences:

Administrators deploy Legend in minutes with a single Docker container. The flat-file backend makes version control and backup straightforward. Tier-based licensing grows with your needs, and no Kubernetes or enterprise infrastructure is required.

Team leads and owners gain clarity on who owns what. Impact analysis becomes possible through dependency tracking. New team members can quickly understand the landscape of services, responsibilities, and expertise.

Every team member discovers services, documentation, and expertise through intelligent search. Instead of asking “who owns this?” or “where is the runbook?”, you navigate directly through connected relationships.

Core Concepts

Legend simplifies your organizational knowledge into three entity types connected by relationships:

Landmarks are the universal points of interest in your organization. A Landmark can be a service, project, resource, event, documentation set, or external vendor. Landmarks are defined by their categories, allowing flexible modeling of your unique environment.

Teams are organizational units with hierarchical relationships. Teams own landmarks and have members.

People are individual contributors with expertise and team affiliations. People can own landmarks and belong to multiple teams.

Relationships turn a simple list into a knowledge graph. Ownership shows who is responsible. Dependencies reveal impact chains. Team membership connects people to their work. Associations link related items without implying dependency.

Quick Start

The fastest way to get Legend running is with the install script. You need a computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) capable of running Docker with at least 512MB of disk space, 512MB of memory, and a single processor core available.

curl -fsSL https://mylegend.io/install-legend.sh | bash

The script checks and downloads dependencies automatically
Docker and Docker Compose are installed as needed, and your user is added to the docker group
The Legend image is pulled to the location you provide
You are prompted for the information required by the .env file
Your instance starts and provides the endpoint to begin onboarding

What You Can Accomplish

With Legend, you can:

Map your entire ecosystem in a single, searchable interface
Track ownership so everyone knows who to ask
Visualize dependencies to understand impact before making changes
Centralize documentation alongside the services it describes
Onboard new team members faster with contextual navigation
Reduce “tribal knowledge” by making implicit relationships explicit

Installation Guide

Detailed installation instructions for Docker, Docker Compose, and the install script. Install Legend →

First Steps

Complete the setup wizard, run through onboarding, and create your first entities. Get started →

System Requirements

Check hardware, software, and network requirements before installing. View requirements →