About shadimage

What shadimage is

shadimage is a directory and search engine for the shadcn/ui ecosystem. It indexes component libraries, block collections, template kits, and icon sets that build on shadcn/ui and Tailwind CSS — then goes one level deeper: for libraries that publish a public registry, every individual component is cataloged with its own metadata.

Three audiences, one site:

• AI coding agents — an MCP server (/api/mcp) exposes search_components, get_component, compare_components, and get_library, so an agent can find and evaluate a component before installing it.
• Human developers — browse per-library component inventories at /product/<library>, search across all of them at /search, and read each component's dependencies, bundle weight, and intended use before committing to it.
• Anyone pricing a stack — every library page states its pricing model honestly, and gated (paid) sources are marked as such rather than hidden.

Where the data comes from

Everything in the catalog is collected from public sources: the libraries' own shadcn-compatible registries (/r/*.json), public sitemaps, and public aggregator indexes. Two rules hold throughout:

1. Metadata, not code. Ingestion collects names, titles, descriptions, categories, dependencies, and links. Component source code is fetched only when you open a component page or ask an agent for it — once, on demand, with a short-lived cache. Paywalled sources stay paywalled; we mark them and move on.
2. Facts in, original copy out. We never republish a vendor's marketing text. Every overview on this site is written from the numbers we observe — item counts, type mix, dependency profile — and every claim traces back to a fact we can show.

How search works

The component search runs on full-text indexes over the catalog (trigram matching, ranked), with semantic tags — where a piece goes in a page, how it looks, what it does — layered on top as filters. When a query returns nothing useful, that gap goes on a list and becomes the next data-quality task.

Scope and honesty

The catalog covers the shadcn/ui ecosystem broadly: free and paid, large and small. "Not indexed yet" is different from "doesn't exist", and a component marked gated means the vendor requires a license — the install command won't work without one. Where our data has known limits (a library with a partial registry, a stale description), we say so on the page instead of papering over it.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a library we should index: hello@shadimage.com.