Developer overview

Editory is a monorepo of six services around one shared package. This page is the map; it’s enough to get the stack running and to know which service owns the thing you’re about to change.

The services

Service	Port	Stack	Owns
client	3000	Next.js 14, React 18, Redux Toolkit	Web app, API routes, auth, Studio chat, the MCP endpoint
server	8000	Flask, LangGraph, Gemini, Azure OpenAI	Script generation, editing agents, fact-check, source discovery
video-editor	7001	Flask, Whisper, MediaPipe, ONNX	The video pipeline, its AI agents, capability endpoints
remotion-renderer	7002	Node 20, Remotion, Chromium	Bundling and encoding; uploads the result
bias_calculator	8080	Flask, PyTorch	Bias scoring
redis	6379	Redis	Cache and session state

packages/video is the single source of truth for the video schema. The same Zod-validated VideoDefinition is used by the editor UI, the pipeline and the renderer — which is why it has to be built before anything else compiles.

flowchart TD
    Browser["Browser<br/><i>Next.js · Redux · Remotion Player</i>"]
    API["Next.js API routes<br/><i>:3000</i>"]
    Server["server<br/><i>Flask :8000</i>"]
    Editor["video-editor<br/><i>Flask :7001</i>"]
    Renderer["remotion-renderer<br/><i>Node :7002</i>"]
    Pkg["@stringer/video<br/><i>schema + components</i>"]
    DB[("Postgres<br/><i>pgvector</i>")]
    Blob[("Blob storage")]

    Browser --> API
    API --> Server
    API --> Editor
    API --> DB
    Editor --> Renderer
    Editor --> DB
    Renderer --> Blob
    Pkg -.->|shared schema| Editor
    Pkg -.->|shared schema| Renderer
    Pkg -.->|shared schema| Browser

Run it locally

The supported path is Docker. Give Docker Desktop at least 8 GB of RAM — the video services run Chromium and local ML models, and 4 GB fails in ways that look like random crashes.

1. Start the stack

   docker compose --profile video up --build

   The video profile is the one you want for any video work. Without it you get the web app, the Flask API and Redis; with it you also get video-editor, remotion-renderer and video-builder (a watcher that rebuilds @stringer/video on change).

2. Wait out the first build

   10–20 minutes. remotion-renderer pulls a full Chromium and video-editor downloads the matting model weights. Every start after that is seconds. Hot reload is on for all services.

3. Open the app

   The app is at http://localhost:3000.

Service names use hyphens

video-editor, remotion-renderer, video-builder. Some of the older docker guides in the repo spell them with underscores; those commands fail.

Everyday commands

docker compose --profile video up -d             # detached
docker compose logs -f client                    # tail one service
docker compose --profile video down              # stop
docker compose --profile video down -v           # ...and wipe volumes
docker compose build --no-cache video-editor     # force-rebuild one image

Without Docker

Slower to set up, faster to iterate. Node 20 and Yarn 1 classic; install at the repo root because it’s a workspace monorepo.

yarn install --ignore-engines

# Build the shared package FIRST. Its dist/ is gitignored and both the client
# and the renderer import from it — nothing compiles until this runs.
yarn workspace @stringer/video build

yarn dev:video      # terminal 1 — rebuild the package on change
yarn dev:client     # terminal 2 — the web app
yarn dev:renderer   # terminal 3 — only if you're rendering

Python services run on 3.11 (server, video-editor) and 3.9 (bias_calculator).

Testing

Every change ships with tests. New routes, agents, utilities or schema fields without coverage get rejected at review.

scripts/test/run-tests.sh all      # every service, ~8s wall-clock
scripts/test/summary.sh            # grep-friendly rollup

scripts/test/run-tests.sh client
scripts/test/run-tests.sh packages-video
scripts/test/run-tests.sh video-editor

Output is one line per service — TESTS: <service> passed=X failed=Y skipped=Z duration=Ws status=PASS|FAIL — with JUnit XML at <service>/test-results/junit.xml.

Where a new test belongs:

You added	Test it in
A Next.js API route	client/src/pages/api/**/__tests__/ (mock the DB, fetch, storage)
A Flask route	A pytest route test via the Flask test client
A Python utility	The service’s own tests/ directory
A schema field or Zod type	packages/video/src/schema/__tests__/ — round-trip and integrity
A graphics category or Remotion component	Vitest in packages/video and remotion-renderer
An agent or agent node	A unit test with mocked LLM responses

Build the shared package before running client tests

Several client tests import @stringer/video, and the bundler can’t resolve the package without its dist/. A skipped build shows up as a resolution error, not as a missing-dependency message.

Branches and CI

feature/* ──PR──> development ──PR──> staging ──PR──> production
                   (light gate)     (build images)     (deploy)

The pipeline is change-detected — only services touched by the diff get tested and built.

Trigger	What runs
PR → development	Detect + unit tests
Push to development	Nothing — the PR already validated the commit
Push to staging	Unit tests + image build + smoke, then push to the registry
Push to production	Retag the staging image and roll the resource

Promotion doesn’t require a PR; pushing to staging or production triggers the same pipeline.

A note on the name

Editory grew out of Stringer, a consumer news platform. The repository, some package names (@stringer/video, stringer-monorepo) and a few storage buckets still carry the old name, and parts of that original codebase are still in the tree but dormant — the consumer news reader, the bias pages, the scrapers under jobs/, and everything under legacy/.

That’s cosmetic. The product is Editory.