Hyrax is a Ruby on Rails engine for building digital repository applications, part of the Samvera community. It provides core functionality for managing scholarly works, collections, file sets, and administrative sets with full lifecycle support: ingest, metadata management, access control (permissions, embargoes, leases), workflow (mediated deposit), analytics (GA4, Matomo), IIIF manifests, fixity checking, and derivatives generation. The architecture is a monolith with a modular actor middleware stack (chain of responsibility) for work creation/update/destroy, dry-transaction steps for resource operations, and a pub/sub event system for decoupled side effects. It supports dual persistence via ActiveFedora (Fedora) and Valkyrie (PostgreSQL, Fedora 6), with migration infrastructure (Wings, Freyja) and a Solr indexing layer. Key entry points include Rails controllers (Blacklight-based search, admin dashboard, API), the actor stack, and transaction steps. The codebase is heavily engineered with reusable patterns but carries significant technical debt from the ongoing migration to Valkyrie, deprecation warnings, and conditional code paths.