Intelligent Legal Visualization and Research
VisuaLex is an advanced web application designed to research, visualize, and study legal texts from Normattiva, EUR-Lex, and Brocardi. It combines a powerful async Python backend with a rich React-based frontend to transform complex regulations into interactive knowledge graphs and structured views.
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| Architecture | System overview, diagrams, data flow |
| Python API Setup | Installation & configuration |
| Python API Reference | All endpoints with payloads |
| Node.js Backend | Platform services & Prisma schema |
| Frontend Setup | Installation & development |
| Component Library | Reusable UI components |
| User Guide | End-user documentation |
| Setup | From clone to a running stack and green suites |
| Git workflow | develop and main, pull requests, review, versions and releases, hotfixes |
| Changelog | What changed, release by release |
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/capazme/VisuaLexAPI.git
cd VisuaLexAPI && git switch develop
./start.shThe one-time setup (Docker, Node, Python, the .env files) is in
docs/setup.md.
- Multi-Source Search: Unified interface for Italian Laws (Normattiva) and EU Regulations (EUR-Lex)
- Study Mode: Distraction-free reading environment with annotation tools
- Brocardi Integration: Automatic retrieval of legal maxims and explanatory notes
- PDF Export: Generate high-quality PDFs of regulations for offline use
- Bookmarks & Dossiers: Organize your research with folders and collections
- Highlights & Annotations: Mark up articles with colors and notes
| Path | What |
|---|---|
apps/web/ |
React + Vite web app |
apps/server/ |
Express + Prisma: accounts, dossiers, community |
services/visualex/ |
Python API (Quart): Normattiva, EUR-Lex, Brocardi |
services/merlt/ |
MERL-T knowledge graph and RLCF (MPL-2.0) |
tools/ |
archive CLI, end-to-end harness |
infra/ |
Docker Compose stack |
scripts/ |
data backup and restore |
docs/ |
documentation — start from docs/README.md |
There is no public deployment at the moment. Releases are tags on main;
day-to-day work goes to develop — see docs/git-workflow.md.
- "Playwright: no such driver": Run
services/visualex/.venv/bin/playwright install chromium - PDF Export Fails: Ensure Chromium is installed via Playwright
- CORS Errors: Check that all services are running on correct ports
Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0) — see LICENSE. The licence covers the whole repository, MERL-T included.
Contributions are accepted under the Developer Certificate of Origin: each
commit carries a Signed-off-by line (git commit -s). There is no
Contributor License Agreement.
The licence covers this software only. The legal texts it retrieves come from third parties: please respect the Terms of Service of Normattiva, EUR-Lex, Brocardi and the Corte di cassazione's SentenzeWeb; the Corte costituzionale's open data are licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 and are credited wherever they appear.
Portions of the act-resolution tables, the Akoma Ntoso parser and the Corte costituzionale open-data reader derive from mcp-legal-it, by the same author, relicensed MIT by the copyright holder; those portions keep the MIT terms.