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 · the proof
  comments · versions · publishing · profiles · .md import
  dark mode · the letterbox · rss · an mcp server
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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. /new is the shortest way in: it always opens a fresh draft.
• 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, the proof reads for exactly the checks you pick (grammar, clarity, clichés, hedging, your own…) with every issue clickable, 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 worn as real highlighter ink (highlighte.rs), named versions with one-click restore, a history of writing sittings each one click from its diff, publishing to a quiet read-only page at /p/<slug>
• the letterbox — open the slot and readers of your published pages can leave an email address; [ ✉ post ] mails a piece to every confirmed address, once, with one-click unsubscribe. postage is metered per writer and the post office has a ceiling it won't spend past
• profiles — an optional public page at /u/<handle> with your social links, a six-month writing contribution chart, whichever published pieces you choose to list (each page has its own toggle), and an rss feed at /u/<handle>/feed.xml
• dark mode — a ☾ in every page's corner turns the paper warm-dark for anyone, ghost or passerby; it follows the OS preference until you choose, and the choice survives reload
• an mcp server — mint an API key in settings and Claude (or any MCP client) can connect at /mcp, read-mostly: list and read your drafts, read their comments, create new drafts — never a live editing session. keys are shown once, hashed at rest, revocable always
• 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 ride to the same bucket beside the words, best-effort, and a restored volume pulls them back down
• the post office needs RESEND_API_KEY (and optionally EMAIL_FROM) to send real letters; without a key every send is a dry run that logs. letter volume and letterbox sizes have their own dials — EMAILS_FREE_MONTHLY, EMAILS_MEMBER_MONTHLY, EMAILS_GLOBAL_DAILY, SUBSCRIBERS_FREE_MAX, SUBSCRIBERS_MEMBER_MAX
• 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
post	Resend — confirmation letters + posted pieces; every send is a logged dry run without a key
margin ink	@highlighters/core — comment marks and live selections as chisel-tip strokes
mcp	MCP over streamable HTTP at /mcp (server/mcp.js)
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:

• a shelf of suites lives in scripts/*-test.mjs — collab sync, imports, the letterbox, mcp, rss, image backups, versions, diffs, and more — all runnable 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