Hyku Documentation
What is Hyku?
Hyku is a digital repository application for managing cultural heritage content. Based on Hyrax, it offers an easy-to-install, easy-to-configure, feature-rich solution supporting next-generation web technologies. Hyku reduces barriers to effective asset management and preservation for collections and content types of many kinds, and is supported by a vibrant and ever-growing open source community.
Hyku has all of the features of the Hyrax version it is built on (which is always getting updated), and a long list of additional features and distinctions, including:
Multi-tenancy, or the ability to host multiple repository “slices” within the same application, each with its own users, objects, and look & feel
Support for the IIIF Image and Presentation APIs
Support for harvesting metadata and content via ResourceSync
Rich object viewing using the Universal Viewer
Four bundled work types: Image Work, OER Work, ETD Work, and Generic Work
and more!
https://samvera.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/hyku/pages/3183083523
https://samvera.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/hyku/pages/3185541162
https://samvera.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/hyku/pages/3185639466
https://samvera.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/hyku/pages/3185541188
https://samvera.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/hyku/pages/3185442911
Other Documentation and Resources
Visit the Hyku YouTube Channel for feature demos and the latest updates.
Hyku User Documentation
Hyku Roadmap-- roadmap work is currently in progress (May 2025) and will be linked when ready.
Hyku Implementations
Demos & Presentations - on the Hyku project site
Hyku Product Beta Test (Beta testing was in 2017, and Hyku was promoted to Samvera in 2019.)
@HykuRepo on Twitter
Hyku Mailing List
History and Latest Releases
Hyku began as the Hydra-in-a-Box project.
Hyku Beta 2.0.0 was released in October 2018 and Hyku was promoted out of Samvera Labs in February 2019. Information about the initial Beta Test can be found below and user documentation is being added to this site regularly.
Hyku 3.0 was released in early 2021, bringing Hyku up to speed with Hyrax, and introducing new theming and other configurations.
Hyku 4.0 was released in May 2022, offering several major new features including cross-tenant search, three new UI theming templates that can be implemented from the Admin appearance dashboard, the ability to make tenants private, to feature collections, and to support multiple domains per tenant.
Hyku 5.0 was released in February 2023, offering the ability to use Solr graph queries to skip having to do nested indexing. Features include Groups with Roles and the ability to implement Google or Motomo analytics.
Hyku 6.1 was released in May 2025, including 6.0 changes like upgrading to Hyrax 5, adding support for Valkyrie, and adding OER and ETD work types, as well as updating Bulkrax and fixing google analytics.
For the latest releases and notes, please visit the Hyku Github repository releases page.