AuditLogX 🔐

Append-Only Centralized Audit Logging Service

AuditLogX is a backend service that records who did what and when across systems. It is designed to model real production audit logging systems used in banking, admin dashboards, and compliance-driven environments (SOC2, GDPR, ISO 27001).

The core goal is immutability, traceability, and correctness, not just CRUD.

✨ Key Features

Append-only audit logs

Database-level enforcement (no UPDATE / DELETE)

Centralized ingestion

Single API for logging user/system actions

Queryable audit trail

Filter by actor, action, and time

Compliance-ready design

Immutable history

Indexed access

Production-style setup

Dockerized services

Alembic migrations

Async FastAPI + PostgreSQL

🧠 Why AuditLogX?

Audit logs are security-critical:

They must not be altered

They must be queryable under pressure

They must survive application bugs

AuditLogX enforces these guarantees at the database layer, not just in application code.

🏗️ Architecture Client / Service | | POST /audit-log v FastAPI (Async) | | SQLAlchemy (async) v PostgreSQL ├─ audit_logs table (append-only) ├─ indexes (actor_id, action, timestamp) └─ trigger blocking UPDATE / DELETE

🧱 Tech Stack

Language: Python 3.11

Framework: FastAPI

Database: PostgreSQL

ORM: SQLAlchemy (async)

Migrations: Alembic

Infra: Docker, Docker Compose

📁 Project Structure auditlogx/ ├── app/ │ ├── main.py # FastAPI app startup │ ├── routes.py # API endpoints │ ├── crud.py # DB operations │ ├── models.py # SQLAlchemy models │ ├── schemas.py # Pydantic schemas │ └── database.py # Async DB setup │ ├── alembic/ │ ├── env.py │ └── versions/ │ └── 0001_create_audit_logs_table.py │ ├── docker-compose.yml ├── Dockerfile ├── alembic.ini ├── requirements.txt └── README.md

🗄️ Database Design audit_logs (append-only) Column Type Purpose id UUID / INT Primary key actor_id TEXT User / service identifier actor_type TEXT user / system / service action TEXT Action performed resource TEXT Target resource metadata JSONB Flexible event data timestamp TIMESTAMPTZ Set by DB Immutability Enforcement

PostgreSQL trigger blocks all:

UPDATE

DELETE

Even compromised application code cannot alter logs

⚙️ Getting Started (Docker) Prerequisites

Docker Desktop