Repos I Use
Requirements: none — this is a reading list of links, nothing to install here — full walkthrough in SETUP.md
A curated, opinionated list of the external open-source repos and tools that make up the working stack behind 19Keys' infrastructure — the git hosts, local AI models, video pipelines, and web frameworks that get reached for over and over.
This is not a tutorial and not a product. It's a map: what's in the stack, why it's there, and where to go get it yourself.
Philosophy: build, don't spend
The default move is to self-host what you can and own the machine, not rent it. Every tool below either runs on hardware you control, ships source you can read and fork, or teaches you how something works well enough that you could rebuild it. SaaS subscriptions get replaced by open-source software running on a Mac Mini or a laptop whenever the tradeoff makes sense. That's the filter this list was built through — not "what's popular," but "what earns a permanent slot in the stack."
If a tool shows up here, it's because it either runs locally, is self-hostable, or is genuinely worth studying source-to-source. Nothing on this list is an ad. No affiliate links, no sponsorships — just the actual repos in daily use.
How to use this
Each entry has: - Link — where to get it - License — check this before you build a business on top of something; some of these are fair-code or source-available, not permissive open source - What it is — one line, no marketing - Why it earned its place — the actual reason it's in the stack instead of a competitor or a paid SaaS tool
Clone what's useful. Fork what needs changing. Skip what doesn't fit your stack.
Infrastructure
Gitea
License: MIT What it is: A lightweight, self-hosted Git service written in Go — a private GitHub/GitLab you run on your own box. Why it earned its place: It's the mature, battle-tested alternative to rolling your own git host from scratch. Single binary, low resource footprint, full web UI, issues, PRs, and a real API. If you're building a self-hosted git host and don't need to reinvent the wheel, this is the wheel.
Postiz
License: AGPL-3.0 What it is: A self-hosted social media scheduling and publishing platform — the open-source alternative to Buffer or Hootsuite. Why it earned its place: Multi-platform scheduling, analytics, and a publish API you can build automation on top of, all running on infrastructure you control instead of a SaaS subscription with per-seat pricing. AGPL means: if you modify and host it as a service for others, you owe the source back — read the license before you build a product on it.
n8n
License: Sustainable Use License (fair-code, not OSI-approved open source) What it is: A visual workflow automation platform — the self-hosted alternative to Zapier or Make. Why it earned its place: Complex multi-step automations (webhooks, API chains, conditional logic) built visually and run on your own server instead of metered per-task pricing. Fair-code license: free to self-host and use internally, restricted if you resell it as a hosted service to third parties.
Supabase
License: Apache-2.0 (core platform; some components are MIT) What it is: An open-source Firebase alternative — Postgres, auth, realtime subscriptions, storage, and edge functions as one platform. Why it earned its place: Real Postgres under the hood (not a proprietary database you can't export), a generous self-hosting path, and a client library good enough that most projects never need to think about the database layer again.
AI / Local Models
Ollama
License: MIT
What it is: A local runtime for running open-weight LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma, and others) on your own machine.
Why it earned its place: The lowest-friction way to run a real model locally — ollama run <model> and you have inference with no API key, no per-token bill, and no data leaving the machine.
whisper.cpp
License: MIT What it is: A C/C++ port of OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model, optimized to run fast on CPU and Apple Silicon. Why it earned its place: Local transcription with no API cost and no audio leaving the machine — the backbone for turning hours of raw voice recordings into usable text without a cloud dependency.
Chatterbox (Resemble AI)
License: MIT What it is: An open-source voice cloning and text-to-speech model from Resemble AI. Why it earned its place: MIT-licensed voice cloning is rare — most of the competitive TTS/cloning tools are closed or subscription-gated. Running it locally means a cloned voice pipeline with no per-generation fee and no third party holding the voice data.
mlx-audio
License: MIT What it is: Audio ML (TTS/STT) built on Apple's MLX framework, tuned to run natively and fast on Apple Silicon GPUs. Why it earned its place: It's the piece that makes local voice generation actually usable on a Mac instead of falling back to a slow CPU path or a cloud API — MLX is the difference between "runs" and "runs fast enough to use."
PAI / fabric-style prompt frameworks
License: MIT What it is: Prompt-pattern frameworks (fabric, and Daniel Miessler's Personal AI Infrastructure work) — structured, reusable prompt libraries for common AI tasks instead of one-off prompting. Why it earned its place: Study material, not a dependency. Worth reading source-to-source for the patterns — how a well-organized prompt library and agent structure gets put together — even when the goal is to build something different rather than run this directly.
Content / Video
Remotion
License: Remotion License (free for individuals and small teams; paid license required above a company-size/revenue threshold — not pure MIT/permissive, check current terms before commercial use) What it is: A framework for creating videos programmatically using React — write a video as code, render it as MP4. Why it earned its place: Video generation as version-controlled code instead of manual editing in a GUI — templates, data-driven video (stats, quotes, captions), and full programmatic control over every frame.
Playwright
License: Apache-2.0 What it is: A browser automation and end-to-end testing framework from Microsoft, supporting Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Why it earned its place: Reliable headless browser control for scraping, design forensics, screenshotting, and automated testing — one API across all three major browser engines instead of juggling separate tools per browser.
Web
FastAPI
License: MIT What it is: A modern Python web framework for building APIs, with automatic docs and built-in data validation. Why it earned its place: Fast to write, fast to run, and the auto-generated OpenAPI docs mean every API gets a working test UI for free. The default choice for any Python backend in the stack.
uvicorn
License: BSD-3-Clause What it is: A lightning-fast ASGI server for running Python async web apps — the server FastAPI runs on. Why it earned its place: It's the production-grade server underneath every FastAPI service — no reason to reach for anything else for a Python ASGI app.
Pygments
License: BSD-2-Clause What it is: A generic syntax highlighting library for Python, supporting hundreds of languages. Why it earned its place: The quiet utility every code-display feature ends up needing — highlighted code blocks in generated docs, dashboards, or reports without hand-rolling a highlighter.
build-your-own-x
License: Curated list repo — no code license applies; check individual linked tutorials for their own terms What it is: A master index of tutorials for building your own version of well-known technology from scratch — your own Docker, your own Git, your own database, your own regex engine, and dozens more. Why it earned its place: It's the reading list behind "build, don't spend" as a practice, not just a slogan. When a tool on this page eventually needs to be replaced with something custom, this is where that build starts.
Adding to this list
A repo earns a slot here by actually being used, not by being interesting. If it's in daily rotation and it's open source or self-hostable, it belongs. If it's a SaaS product with no self-hosted path, it doesn't — the whole point of this list is the stuff you can own.