Running Babblebird yourself

Babblebird is open source under the AGPL. It runs on Cloudflare: two Workers, D1, R2 and Queues.

Locally

You need Bun. Everything runs on your machine, with a local git repository standing in for GitHub.

git clone https://github.com/Lantharos/Babblebird
cd Babblebird
bun install
cp apps/api/.dev.vars.example apps/api/.dev.vars

In apps/api/.dev.vars, set a long random BETTER_AUTH_SECRET and GITHUB_WEBHOOK_SECRET, any RSA key as GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY (openssl genrsa 2048), and add GITHUB_API=http://localhost:8790 and PUBLIC_URL=http://localhost:5180. Then, in separate terminals:

git clone --bare --shared ../your-project /tmp/project.git
bun tools/local-github/server.ts --repo /tmp/project.git --owner you --name project
cd apps/api && bun run db:migrate && bun run dev
cd apps/web && bun run dev
bun tools/local-github/send.ts install --owner you --name project

Open http://localhost:5180. Sign-in codes appear in the API's output. send.ts push <before> <after> --repo /tmp/project.git sends a push for a range of commits, and translations sent back become real commits in the bare repository.

On Cloudflare

Create the D1 databases, the R2 bucket and the two queues named in apps/api/wrangler.jsonc, then:

cd apps/api && bun run deploy
cd apps/web && bun run deploy

bun scripts/github-app.ts in apps/api creates a GitHub App from scripts/github-app.json and stores its secrets in the Worker. Set BETTER_AUTH_SECRET yourself with bunx wrangler secret put BETTER_AUTH_SECRET. Sign-in codes are sent with Cloudflare's Email Service, which needs your domain set up for sending.

How it works inside is in docs/design.md.