Arbiter

Arbiter is a human-in-the-loop deidentification platform. It runs your documents through the Philter / Phileas PII detector and gives reviewers a fast, focused workflow for confirming or correcting every detection before the document leaves the redactor.

For full documentation — installation, configuration, user and admin guides, REST API reference, and more — see https://philterd.github.io/arbiter.

Quick start

1. Create your .env file with a secret key.

Copy the example file and generate a cryptographically random 256-bit key:

cp .env.example .env
echo "ARBITER_CRYPTO_SECRET=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" > .env

ARBITER_CRYPTO_SECRET must be a base64-encoded 32-byte value. Arbiter refuses to start if it is missing, not valid base64, or does not decode to exactly 32 bytes.

2. Build the Docker image.

docker compose build

3. Start Arbiter.

docker compose up

Arbiter will be available at http://localhost:8080. The bootstrap admin account is admin@philterd.ai with the password set in ARBITER_ADMIN_INITIAL_PASSWORD in docker-compose.yaml. Arbiter refuses to start if that variable is missing or shorter than 12 characters.

Building the Docker image

build-image.sh builds the image for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. push-image.sh publishes it to philterd/arbiter on Docker Hub. Both take a version as their first argument; with none, they use the Maven project version from pom.xml, so an unversioned build is tagged with what it actually contains.

./build-image.sh 1.0.0
./push-image.sh 1.0.0

build-image.sh loads each architecture under its own tag (1.0.0-amd64, 1.0.0-arm64), so both are available locally to run and test. push-image.sh pushes those two tags and joins them into the 1.0.0 tag that users pull. It builds nothing, so what is published is what was built and tested.

Set ARCHES to build a single architecture:

ARCHES=amd64 ./build-image.sh

Pass latest explicitly to publish under that tag:

./build-image.sh latest
./push-image.sh latest

Related Philterd open source projects

Arbiter is part of a wider family of open source data-privacy tools from Philterd. The full catalog lives at https://www.philterd.ai/open-source-software/.

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.