---
title: Clapper
emoji: 🎬
sdk: docker
colorFrom: gray
colorTo: gray
pinned: true
app_port: 3000
disable_embedding: false
hf_oauth: false
header: mini
short_description: 🎬 Clapper
---

> Clapper is in a **_very_** early stage. There are no tutorials, some UI features and buttons won't work, some workflows are broken, and there are no tests.
> Want this to change? Come join our open-source community to help build Clapper!

![Demo|600](documentation/videos/20240826.gif)

# Introduction

🎬 Clapper is an open-source AI story visualization tool.

Prototyped [a year ago](https://www.loom.com/share/25b60750a32c4183b7fadc622d7c0120?sid=f1173e95-1ec8-4be2-831d-54b18e835367), Clapper is not designed to replace traditional video editors or modern AI editors using 3D scenes as input.

Clapper's philosophy is for anyone to create videos using AI through an interactive, iterative and intuitive process, without the need for external tools, filmmaking or AI engineering skills.

In Clapper you don't edit a sequence of video and audio files directly, but iterate (with the help from your AI assistant) over your story using high-level abstractions such as characters, locations, weather, time period, style etc.

To this end I am also working on a Director's Mode, where you can just put the video in fullscreen, sit confortably in your director's chair (or couch), shouting orders at your AI set assistant to produce your movie.

# Public alpha access

A public instance of Clapper is currently hosted on [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/spaces/jbilcke-hf/clapper/tree/main), you can try it at [Clapper.app](https://clapper.app/)

# Open-source philosophy

The whole the project is open-source.

To participate, please join us on [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/AEruz9B92B).

The roadmap is public, too: [Clapper roadmap](https://github.com/users/jbilcke-hf/projects/6/views/4).

# Badges

- Build and tests status: [![E2E & Unit Tests](https://github.com/jbilcke-hf/clapper/actions/workflows/tests.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/jbilcke-hf/clapper/actions/workflows/tests.yml)

- Sponsor a feature: (temporary disabled due to an issue with the bounty provider)

# Bounty Sponsors

Those generous sponsors are paying for code bounties:

- Moon ([github](https://github.com/lalalune), [twitter](https://x.com/spatialweeb), [website](https://www.moon.graphics))

# Want to contribute?

## For users or corporations

### Sponsor specific features

!!  ATTENTION: there is currently an issue with the platform we initially used for bounties. We are looking for an alternative solution. !!

## For developers

### Licence

Clapper is under a GPL v3 licence, see the [LICENCE](LICENSE.txt) file for more information. This is a similar licensing to apps like ComfyUI or Blender.


### Installation

### Prerequisites

As a prerequisite you need to have [git lfs](https://git-lfs.com/) installed (see the `.gitattributes` file at the root of project):

```bash
git lfs install
```

You will also need to install [Bun](https://bun.sh/docs/installation)

Clapper has been tested with Node `20.17.0`.

To make sure you use this version, you can use [NVM](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm) to activate it:

```bash
nvm install
nvm use
```

If you find that Clapper is working with a more recent (stable) version of Node, or have a better version management to suggest, please open a ticket.

### Installation

Install the dependencies.

`--include=optional` is to make sure optional dependencies are installed (pre-build native modules compatible with your system)

```bash
bun i
```

You can run the following command to build the app, making sure all the types are consistant and properly set:

```bash
npm run build
```

### Running the web app


Then run the actual app, the first time you go to localhost:3000 after typing this command, the app will compile, which can take a minute (like, literally: `Compiled / in 52.6s (6372 modules)`)

```bash
bun run dev
```

### Running the app with Electron


An Electron build is in progress.

There are still some things to debug and figure out, but if you are a developer you can try it out by starting Clapper through Electron like this:


```bash
cd packages/app
bun run electron:start
```

If that doesn't work for you (issue with node-gyp, setuptools, distutils etc) you might have to run:

```bash
python3 -m pip install --break-system-packages setuptools
```

You can also build Clapper for your operating system by typing:

```bash
cd packages/app
bun run electron:make
```

You might see a DeprecationWarning message written in red at the end but that's only a warning, just open `./out/make` to check if the build worked.

### Code conventions

I have setup Prettier and ESLint, they use some basic rules (you can propose new rules if you want to)

### Testing

To run all the tests (unit and e2e) please run: 

```bash
bun run test
```

This is not instantaneous: playwright may seems to do nothing for a while at first.

@jbilcke-hf is working to add more tests, and will also act as the "QA engineer".

#### Unit tests

Note: I've just added Vitest so we only have a few tests for now.


To run the test without watching, type:

```bash
cd packages/app
bun run test:unit:ci
```

To run the tests with watching, type:

```bash
cd packages/app
bun run test:unit:watch
```

#### End-to-end tests

Note: I've just added Playwright, but we don't really have tests yet.

Please note that due to the app needing to build during 30~60s (depending on the speed of your computer), running those tests may
take some time to execute.

`bun run test:e2e`

More Playwright commands:
  `bunx playwright test`
    Runs the end-to-end tests.

  `bunx playwright test --ui`
    Starts the interactive UI mode.

  `bunx playwright test --project=chromium`
    Runs the tests only on Desktop Chrome.

  `bunx playwright test example`
    Runs the tests in a specific file.

 ` bunx playwright test --debug`
    Runs the tests in debug mode.

  `bunx playwright codegen`
    Auto generate tests with Codegen.

We suggest that you begin by typing:

    `bunx playwright test`


### Architecture

![Arch|800](documentation/diagrams/architecture-draft.png)

For convenience, you can access and inspect any of the services at runtime (in the browser's JS console) by typing `useUI.getState(), useIO.getState()` etc