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Overview

Documentation

Bitween documentation

How Bitween receives, validates, transforms, delivers and records every exchange, and how to run it in production. Written from the source code and kept in sync with the repository.

Overview

README.md

Bitween is a self-hosted integration platform. It takes business documents in from partners, HTTP calls, message brokers, databases and scheduled pulls. It validates, transforms and delivers them, and keeps a searchable record of every exchange.

One .NET 10 service hosts everything: the REST API, the partner-facing gateway endpoints, background processing, the scheduler and the React admin UI.

These docs are written from the source code as of 11 September 2026. They replace the earlier README and docs/ pages, which described an older version of Bitween.

What Bitween does#

  • Many ways in. Partners call an API gateway. Other systems publish to Bitween's bus, or to their own RabbitMQ or Amazon SQS broker. Scheduled jobs pull from HTTP APIs, S3, Azure Blob, SFTP/FTP, POP3 mailboxes and databases. Aggregations roll finished exchanges up on a schedule.
  • One pipeline. Every message becomes an exchange that runs through the same stages: filter, map, deliver, route the response.
  • Adapters for each stage. Built-in adapters cover HTTP, S3, Azure Blob, SFTP/FTP, POP3 and SMTP, plus a visual rules-based mapper for JSON and XML. Anything else can be a custom adapter that runs out of process.
  • Long-lived connections. Data sources hold connections to RabbitMQ and Amazon SQS brokers and to PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle databases, so deliveries can publish messages or run SQL.
  • Reliability built in. Retry policies match failures and retry them with a delay and a shared budget. Every exchange's retries form a chain you can follow. Exhausted budgets raise alerts, and notifiers report results.
  • Operable. Queue health straight from RabbitMQ, data source health, schedule health, run history, receive attempts, a dashboard and an audit trail of every configuration change.
  • Administered in the browser. Roles with fine-grained permissions, Microsoft sign-in, and settings and branding that change at runtime.

How it fits together#

flowchart LR
  subgraph In[Entry points]
    GW[API gateway]
    BUS[Bus gateway]
    JOB[Scheduled job]
    AGG[Aggregation]
  end
  subgraph Core[Bitween service]
    X[(Exchange)]
    P[Filter, mapper, handler]
    R[Result and retry policy]
  end
  EXT[(Customer broker or database)]
  EXT --> BUS
  EXT --> JOB
  GW --> X
  BUS --> X
  JOB --> X
  AGG --> X
  X -->|work group queue| P --> R
  P -->|delivery| OUT[Partner systems]
  P -->|publish or SQL| EXT
  R -->|notifiers and alerts| N[Handler adapters]
  X -. files .-> S[(Object storage)]
  R -. rows .-> DB[(Bitween database)]

Requirements#

Component Supported
Build .NET 10 SDK, Node 22 with Yarn for the admin UI
Database PostgreSQL, SQL Server or MySQL 8
Message broker RabbitMQ, with the management plugin for queue health
Object storage S3-compatible, Azure Blob Storage, Oracle Cloud Object Storage, or local disk in Development

Quick start#

This runs Bitween locally against PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ and local-disk storage.

  1. Start the dependencies.

    docker run -d --name bitween-pg -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres postgres:16
    docker run -d --name bitween-mq -p 5672:5672 -p 15672:15672 rabbitmq:3-management
  2. Build the admin UI into the web host's wwwroot.

    cd SW.Bitween.Web/ClientApp
    yarn install
    yarn build
    cd ../..
  3. Configure and run the service.

    export ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development
    export Bitween__DatabaseType=PgSql
    export ConnectionStrings__BitweenDb="Host=localhost;Port=5432;Database=bitween;Username=postgres;Password=postgres"
    export ConnectionStrings__RabbitMQ="amqp://guest:guest@localhost:5672/"
    export Bitween__StorageProvider=Local
    export CloudFiles__BucketName=bitween
    export Token__Key="replace-with-a-random-string-of-at-least-32-chars"
    export Token__Issuer=bitween-local
    export Token__Audience=bitween-local
    export Bitween__RabbitMqManagementUrl=http://localhost:15672
    export Bitween__RabbitMqManagementUsername=guest
    export Bitween__RabbitMqManagementPassword=guest
    
    dotnet run --project SW.Bitween.Web
  4. Open https://localhost:5000 and sign in as the seeded administrator.

    [email protected]
    Mtm@dmin!2

The database schema is created on first start. Change the administrator password straight away, and work through the production checklist before exposing an instance. To use brokers or databases as data sources, see Data sources.

Repository layout#

Path Purpose
SW.Bitween.Web ASP.NET Core host: startup, authentication, security headers, and the admin UI in ClientApp
SW.Bitween.Api Domain model, database context, API handlers, exchange pipeline, jobs, settings and the data source supervisor
SW.Bitween.NativeAdapters Built-in adapters and the rules-based mapper
SW.Bitween.Adapters.Bus.RabbitMq, SW.Bitween.Adapters.Bus.Sqs Resident broker adapters
SW.Bitween.Adapters.Db.* Resident database adapters and their shared core
SW.Bitween.Sdk Shared models and the retry policy evaluator, published to NuGet as SimplyWorks.Bitween.Sdk
SW.Bitween.PgSql, SW.Bitween.MySql, SW.Bitween.MsSql Provider-specific database contexts and migrations
SW.Bitween.Sample* Sample custom adapters, including a resident handler
SW.Bitween.UnitTests, SW.Bitween.IntegrationTests Test suites
tools Development databases for trying the database adapters
charts/default Helm chart
Dockerfile Container image build

License#

MIT. See LICENSE.