author*

a quiet place to write — together.

author* is a small, open-source collaborative writing app: a calm serif page with live multiplayer editing, an editor you can ask things of, comments, versions, and one-click publishing. A modern interpretation of the word processor — for anyone who writes, whether that's tweets, letters to your landlord, or the novel.

Live at author.computer.

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  ghost writing · live cursors · ⌘K rewrites · checks · titles
  comments · versions · publishing · profiles · .md import
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how it works

• just start writing — no account needed. the landing page drops you straight into a draft as a ghost. you get the full editor, live collaboration, and one model request on the house. creating an account (just an email and a password) carries everything you wrote with you — five model requests a month are free, membership lifts the limit.
• live collaboration — Yjs CRDTs over WebSockets; share a writing link and whoever opens it lands in the draft with you, named cursors and all
• an editor on call — ask streams feedback on the draft, checks returns clickable proofreading issues, titles offers eight on demand, and ⌘K rewrites any selection to instruction
• formatting — select text for the floating toolbar (bold, italic, underline, strike, code, headings, quotes, links), or type markdown and watch it convert; the usual ⌘B/⌘I/⌘U shortcuts all work
• pages — header images (any format — the browser recompresses), comments in the margin, named versions with one-click restore, publishing to a quiet read-only page at /p/<slug>
• profiles — an optional public page at /u/<handle> with your social links, a six-month writing contribution chart, and whichever published pieces you choose to list (each page has its own toggle)
• import — bring your writing with you: every .md file becomes its own draft, titles from # headings, links and formatting intact

running it

npm install
cp .env.example .env       # add your Anthropic API key
npm run build              # builds the client into dist/
npm start                  # serves everything on http://localhost:3001

Two dev accounts are seeded on first run (ink / quill, password author). Open the same draft in two windows to see live editing.

production notes

• deploys anywhere a container runs (Dockerfile); fly.toml included — mount a volume at /app/data so the database and images persist
• required in production: BETTER_AUTH_SECRET (random 32+ bytes) and BETTER_AUTH_URL (your origin) — the server refuses to boot without them
• backups: with BUCKET_NAME + AWS_* secrets set (on Fly: fly storage create), litestream continuously replicates the database to S3-compatible storage and restores it automatically onto an empty volume; without them the entrypoint warns that replication is off. images are not in the replica — they live only on the volume
• ship with npm run deploy — snapshots the volume, builds, deploys, and verifies prod serves the new bundle
• model spend is tiered: ghosts get one request, free accounts get AI_FREE_MONTHLY (default 5) per month, members get AI_DAILY_CAP (default 150) per day, and the whole site stops at AI_GLOBAL_DAILY_CAP (default 1000) per day. flip membership with node scripts/set-member.mjs <handle> on

stack

layer	choice
editor	Tiptap (ProseMirror) + React + Vite
collab	Yjs — custom y-websocket server (server/collab.js)
auth	Better Auth — cookie sessions, anonymous ghosts, username + email login
server	Express + ws + better-sqlite3 (single file DB in data/)
editor brain	Anthropic API (claude-opus-4-8), server-side only, never in the browser
analytics	Seline — cookie-free page views + product events; editor URLs are masked client-side

contributing

Contributions welcome — issues, PRs, wild ideas. Useful things to know:

• scripts/collab-test.mjs <cookieA> <cookieB> <docId> smoke-tests two-client live sync; scripts/import-test.mjs <cookie> exercises the markdown import pipeline; both run against any server via AUTHOR_BASE / AUTHOR_WS_URL
• security posture: bcrypt passwords, origin-checked mutations and websockets, sanitized public HTML, magic-byte-validated uploads, rate-limited credential endpoints — read the git history for the review trail
• keep the design quiet: whitespace over chrome, ascii accents over icons, serif for prose, mono for furniture.

license

MIT