---
title: Overview
description: Every Lakefront export, option, and wire shape, by import path.
---

Lakefront ships as one npm package, `lakefront`, as TypeScript source. It requires Bun 1.2 or later and does not run on Node. The package exposes five import paths, one per front-door verb, each with its own reference page.

| Import path                                 | Verb        | What it is                                                                                         |
| ------------------------------------------- | ----------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| [`lakefront`](/reference/engine)            | **open**    | `open`/`openSafe`, the `Engine` class: reads, writes, transactions, schema, and `watch`.           |
| [`lakefront/client`](/reference/client)     | **connect** | `connect`, the board client, and the Kysely query builder dialect.                                 |
| [`lakefront/server`](/reference/server)     | **serve**   | `serve`, the HTTP node that fronts an engine with auth and SSE.                                    |
| [`lakefront/router`](/reference/router)     | **route**   | `route`, the cluster router: cache-affinity hashing, hedging, failover.                            |
| [`lakefront/contract`](/reference/contract) | (contract)  | The wire contract, capability tokens, and the transport client used by both `client` and `router`. |

Cross-cutting references, not tied to one import path:

| Page                                            | Covers                                                    |
| ----------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- |
| [Wire protocol](/reference/wire-protocol)       | The HTTP envelope, headers, and SSE event format.         |
| [Environment variables](/reference/environment) | Environment variables read by the server node and router. |
| [Error catalog](/reference/errors)              | The full tagged-error catalog and their `_tag` values.    |

For narrative documentation, covering installation, a guided tour, and the design decisions behind these APIs, start at the [quickstart](/guides/quickstart) or the [concepts](/concepts) pages.