Ledger (Data Governance)

Ledger is the data governance service for the Shift Platform. It provides audit event logging, retention policy management, and field-level classification to help teams maintain compliance and data accountability.

What It Does

• Audit Events — Emit and query audit events that record who did what, to which resource, and when.
• Retention Policies — Define how long data should be retained, scoped by service or resource type.
• Field Classifications — Classify individual data fields by sensitivity level (e.g., PII, public, confidential) with justification.

Key Concepts

Concept	Description
Audit Event	An immutable record of an action performed by an actor on a resource.
Retention Policy	A rule defining how long data in a given scope should be retained.
Classification	A sensitivity label applied to a specific field within a service's data model.

Configuration

Setting	Value
Storage Directory	.ledger/
API Dev Port	4004
Web Dev Port	4104
Gateway Prefix	/api/v1/ledger/*

Getting Started

Emit your first audit event:

shift-cli ledger events emit

Or via the API:

curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/v1/ledger/events \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "action": "service.deployed",
    "actor": "ci-pipeline",
    "resource": "payment-api",
    "metadata": {"version": "1.2.3", "environment": "production"}
  }'

Then set up retention policies and field classifications:

shift-cli ledger policies create
shift-cli ledger classifications create