Architecture Overview

Construction in Progress

Currently, the production version of Stellar Explorer relies on the Horizon API for data retrieval. The custom Indexer architecture described in this section is under active development and will replace direct Horizon calls in future updates to enable advanced features.

Stellar Explorer is a Next.js 16 application that reads data from the Stellar network through two main interfaces: the Indexer API (for optimized historical and real-time data) and Soroban RPC (for smart contract interactions).

Components

Frontend

The frontend is a React 19 application built with the Next.js App Router. It uses TanStack Query for data fetching and caching, shadcn/ui for the component library, and Tailwind CSS 4 for styling.

All pages are server-side rendered on first load and then hydrated for client-side navigation.

Backend Services (Indexer)

The Go-based indexer service processes Stellar ledger data into PostgreSQL (with TimescaleDB), Redis, and Typesense. This architecture enables advanced queries, full-text search, and analytics that are not possible with Horizon alone.

See the Indexer Pipeline for detailed implementation.

Stellar Explorer also includes a terminal interface in apps/tui and a dedicated data service in services/tui-indexer. Together they provide keyboard-driven Stellar lookup, live monitoring, search, timelines, and source-aware reads for terminal workflows. See TUI Architecture.

Stellar Network

The system interacts with the Stellar network at two levels:

• Stellar Node — Ingested by the Indexer for high-performance data serving.
• Soroban RPC — Queried directly by the frontend for smart contract data (code, storage, events).

Key Design Decisions

• Indexer-first architecture — Optimized for speed and complex relational queries.
• Network-agnostic — All data fetching includes the network parameter, enabling seamless switching.
• Cached SDK clients — Indexer and RPC clients are created once per network and reused.
• Immutable data caching — Ledgers, transactions, and contract code use staleTime: Infinity since they never change.