EU law with its dates, relationships, and official text. A reviewed, configuration-led scope of binding EU law across the domains most useful to Luxembourg practitioners. It stores every available official original and consolidated expression in French and English, plus the amendment, corrigendum, repeal, predecessor, successor, legal-basis, delegated, and implementing relationships needed to explain the timeline.
The generated manifest and the live coverage page are the source of truth for counts and date ranges. They are not copied into prose that becomes stale after the next publisher run.
Per-article dataset · Live demo · MCP endpoint · Engine
A clone is a complete, tamper-evident copy, every byte covered by a sha256 recorded inside the content itself. No API, no account, no database server: the format outlives any website built on top of it.
What git is not here is the timeline. A commit records when this corpus
observed a version, never when the act applied. Both time axes live inside the
hashed content, in each version's meta.json, never in mutable commit
metadata. The full argument, and what that choice cost, is at
law.soufien.lu/decisions.
The scope is expandable: adding another EUR-Lex subject domain for an existing document class is a reviewed configuration change and backfill. A new publisher or document class still requires an adapter implementation and its own evidence tests. The exact selectors, exclusions, and closure rules are published in the engine repository.
Only acts published in the Official Journal are authentic. Every version here links to its EUR-Lex page; consolidations are working documents. Lex serves them with that statement attached (spec §9.6), always the timeline and the text, never an interpretation.
works/32013r0575/ ← CRR
meta.json
versions/
2013-06-28/
meta.json ← validity, events, observations, sha256
en.html ← verbatim XHTML when that channel is used
en.fmx4/ ← Formex 4 manifestation, verbatim zip members
CL2013R0575EN0000020.0001.xml ← one sha256 observation per member (format: "fmx4")
2015-01-18/… ← 22 dated states
valid_from is the publisher's expression date; valid_to derives from the
next official expression in the publisher's own sequence. Bodies above 4 MB keep
metadata + link only (disclosed per-version as text.available=false,
reason="not-fetched"), for those versions the Formex manifestation usually
still fits and carries the full text. Formex is fetched with an identity guard:
the file's own INFO.CONSLEG START.DATE must match the version date, or it is
not stored.
- What does it publish? Binding regulations, directives, decisions, primary law, and their available original and consolidated expressions, https://eur-lex.europa.eu.
- Authority? Binding EU instruments (regulations directly applicable, directives on transposition); consolidations are non-authentic working texts, per the publisher's own notice.
- Retrievable mechanically? Yes, Cellar SPARQL + REST content negotiation
(publications.europa.eu; robots.txt:
Allow: /for these paths). - May we republish the text? Yes, reuse permitted with attribution, Commission Decision 2011/833/EU.
- May we republish the metadata? Yes, same basis.
- Superseded versions retained? Yes, Tier A; every consolidated version remains addressable by CELEX.
© European Union, 1998-2026, reuse permitted with attribution (Commission Decision 2011/833/EU). Bodies stored verbatim as retrieved; no text altered. See NOTICE. Demo + MCP server: https://github.com/SFHAJJI/lex
- Browse: any
works/<slug>/versions/<date>/meta.json - The lex-index/3 release contract covers local vectors, the pinned encoder and tokenizer, scope, and benchmark evidence. A canonical whole-artifact manifest binds every file by hash and size and is signed with a non-exportable Azure Key Vault P-256 key. The embedded index stamp remains public provenance, not the runtime trust root. The live rollout state is reported at law.soufien.lu/verify.
- MCP server + web demo: https://github.com/SFHAJJI/lex
One scheduled job runs nightly and drives every publisher in the fleet. There is no manual publication step. GitHub Actions uses OIDC and short-lived Azure authorization; the signing private key never leaves Key Vault.
- Ingest, ask the publisher which versions exist, download any not seen before, write them verbatim. An existing body file is never reopened for writing: the evidence layer is append-only by construction.
- Anomaly gate, if the work count drops by more than 5%, assume a partial upstream response, discard everything and commit nothing. A bad night leaves yesterday's good data in place rather than corrupting history.
- Derive, regenerate the per-article layer in lex-articles.
- Determinism guard, if derived output changed while no source file did, the extractor is non-deterministic: fail loudly, commit nothing.
- Index & sign, build lex-index/3, local vectors and benchmark evidence, sign the canonical artifact manifests, and verify every file before release.
- Deploy safely, build an immutable image, start a zero-traffic Container App revision, exercise health, MCP, Luxembourg and EU search, then promote it.
- Report, write a three-state outcome per publisher
(
ran_committed/ran_no_change/failed_*) and open an issue on failure.
Every index carries a provenance stamp recording when it was built and from which corpus commit, and every MCP tool response returns it. Runtime trust is reported separately from the pinned whole-artifact manifest. Live status: https://law.soufien.lu/built
This is free and open, and it stays that way whatever you decide. It is also not free to run: the live site, the nightly jobs and the storage sit on Azure infrastructure I pay for out of pocket, and I maintain it on my own time.
If it saved you an afternoon, you can buy me a coffee ☕ and put it towards the hosting bill. Starring the repo helps just as much, and costs nothing.