cube-js/cube

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Cube Core is the open-source semantic layer. Define metrics, dimensions, joins, and access rules once in code, then expose them through SQL, REST, and GraphQL APIs to anything downstream — BI tools, custom applications, or AI agents. Cube Core is headless: it doesn't ship a UI, so you can build the analytics experience that fits your product.

Cube Core works with all SQL data sources, including cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery; query engines like Presto and Amazon Athena; and application databases like Postgres. It has a built-in relational caching engine to provide sub-second latency and high concurrency for API requests.

Learn more about connecting Cube to data sources and analytics & visualization tools.

Every BI tool relies on a semantic layer as its core engine — the component that defines metrics, dimensions, and business logic and hides the complexity of the underlying data sources. Most semantic layers are proprietary, tightly coupled to a single BI platform, and can't be reused across other tools.

Cube Core is an open, standalone semantic layer that any analytics application or AI agent can consume through standard APIs. Define your metrics once and use them everywhere — internal BI, embedded analytics, AI agents — without re-implementing the model in each place.

You can run Cube Core locally or self-host it with Docker.

Once Docker is installed, in a new folder for your project, run:

docker run -p 4000:4000 \
  -p 15432:15432 \
  -v ${PWD}:/cube/conf \
  -e CUBEJS_DEV_MODE=true \
  cubejs/cube

Then open http://localhost:4000 in your browser to continue setup.

Development mode is an authentication bypass. In the official images — whose entrypoint is the cubejs CLI — CUBEJS_DEV_MODE=true also forces NODE_ENV=development, which switches off JWT verification on the REST (JSON) and GraphQL APIs, so they accept requests with no token at all. Playground and its supporting endpoints are served with no authentication either, so anyone who can reach the instance is handed a ready-to-use API token (and can mint others carrying any security context, signed with your API secret), can read your data model, and can overwrite it and your