Installation

Requirements

Craft CMS 5.3 or later
PHP 8.2 or later

No build step, and no dependencies beyond Craft. HTML Purifier comes with Craft itself.

Install

composer require justinholtweb/craft-jack
php craft plugin/install jack

Or find Jack in the Craft Plugin Store and install it from there.

Installing creates five tables: documents, their per-site text, the profile, the inventory and the version history. It adds no fields, sections or entry types, so there's no content model to build.

A fresh install isn't blank. The inventory already holds Server log files and Session and security cookies, because every Craft site has both. They're marked always on and can't be removed.

Nothing reaches your visitors until you publish

Jack keeps two copies of every document:

The draft. Jack writes it from your profile and inventory, and rewrites it whenever either changes. The edit screen in the control panel shows you this copy.
The published text. What visitors see, at the document's URL and anywhere a template renders it. It changes only when someone with the Publish documents permission publishes the document.

A document you've just created has a draft and nothing published. Its page is empty until you publish it. See Usage.

Your first ten minutes

Open Jack → Profile. Work through the sections: Company, Contact, Data protection, Hosting, This site and the rest. The bar at the top shows what percentage of the facts the clause library asks for you've filled in.
Open Jack → Inventory. Under Add a service, pick everything this site uses from From the library: analytics, payment providers, embedded videos, fonts, maps, newsletters. On Pro, Find undeclared services reads your templates and tells you what you missed.
Open Jack → Documents and press New document. Pick Imprint / legal notice and press Create. Do the same for Privacy policy.
Read each draft on its edit screen. Fix anything listed under This document is incomplete. on the profile, and read the result again.
Click Publish beside Save and confirm. The document is now live at its URL: /impressum and /datenschutz on a German site, /legal-notice and /privacy-policy on an English one.
Open Jack → Audit and work down the list.
Link both documents from every page, usually in the footer. See Templating.

Before step 5, have someone accountable read the draft. Jack is not a lawyer. See What Jack is not.

Editions

Lite is free. Pro is $99, then $79 a year for updates.

The split follows one rule: Lite gets you legal, Pro keeps you maintained. Lite compiles the two documents German law requires of a website, from the whole clause library and the whole processor registry. Pro adds everything that keeps them true over time and across sites.

	Lite	Pro
Price	Free	$99, then $79/year for updates
Imprint and privacy policy	✅	✅
The whole clause library and all 44 services in the registry	✅	✅
The profile, the inventory and the audit	✅	✅
Publishing a document	✅	✅
Told when a document is out of date	✅	✅
Twig API, reference tags and the Legal document field	✅	✅
Cookie policy, terms and conditions, withdrawal instructions, disclaimer, accessibility statement, social media privacy	—	✅
Every site and language, with per-site profile overrides	—	✅
Rewriting a section, leaving one out, adding your own	—	✅
Seeing which paragraphs changed when a document is out of date	—	✅
Find undeclared services	—	✅
Version history and comparing versions	—	✅
Console commands and the CI check	—	✅

On Lite, documents are compiled for the primary site only, in that site's language.

Publishing works the same on both editions. Every publish on Lite still writes a version to the history table. You just can't browse or compare those versions until you switch to Pro.

Upgrading from Lite to Pro

Buy Pro in the Plugin Store, or switch the edition in Settings → Plugins and add the licence key there. There's nothing to migrate. Documents, the profile, the inventory and every version published on Lite are all still there.

After switching:

New document offers every document type.
On a multi-site install, the profile screen links to per-site overrides, and documents compile for every site.
Each section on a document's edit screen gets a Rewrite this section button.
Find undeclared services appears on the inventory screen, and the audit starts reporting services it finds on the site that aren't declared.
History appears in a document's Actions menu.
The jack/* console commands work.

The edition is stored in project config. If a deploy re-applies a project.yaml that still says Lite, the Pro features stop working without an error. Commit the edition change with the rest of your config.

A lapsed licence never blanks a document

Editions gate creating and editing. Text that's already published keeps rendering if a Pro licence lapses, including a cookie policy or terms document that Lite couldn't create. A privacy policy that 404s over a billing problem is worse than anything that would prevent.

What Jack is not

A lawyer. Jack produces drafts from facts you supply, using boilerplate that is conventional rather than bespoke. It is not legal advice. Somebody accountable should read a document before it is published, and a business with unusual processing needs advice, not a generator.

A consent banner. Jack describes what the site does. It doesn't hold scripts back until a visitor agrees. If you have a banner, drive it from Jack's inventory so the two can't disagree. See Templating.

Uninstalling

Uninstalling drops all five tables. Documents, the profile, the inventory and the version history go with them. Export anything you need to keep, especially the published versions, first.