The Virtue Initiative

This is the main repository for The Virtue Initiative, which aims to provide free tools and resources for accountability. This repository contains all the code for the websites and client apps. This project is not production ready. Consider it alpha stage software. We have a working prototype, but not much else. See the feature table on the homepage for more information about the current state.

Structure

• /web contains the code for the main web app. (https://app.virtueinitiative.org)
• /landing contains the code for the landing page and help pages. (https://virtueinitiative.org)
• /client contains subdirectories containing the code for the various desktop/mobile monitoring apps.
• /api contains the API code that runs on Cloudflare workers. (https://api.virtueinitiative.org)

Local Development

This project uses Bun as its package manager and runtime.

First-time setup

The NSFW screenshot model (client/core/models/*.nnef.tar) is stored with Git LFS. Install and pull it before building any client, or the risk classifier silently reports 0 for every screenshot (the client build now fails loudly if the model is still an unresolved LFS pointer):

git lfs install
git lfs pull

Run the setup script from the repo root. It installs all dependencies, copies example config files, runs local database migrations, and installs/configures Caddy for HTTPS reverse-proxying:

./scripts/setup.sh

Also configure the git hooks:

git config --local core.hookspath scripts/hooks

Starting the dev servers

Use launch.sh to start the API, web app, and landing site together with interleaved, colour-coded logs. Ports are chosen automatically.

Plain HTTP (simplest):

./scripts/launch.sh

HTTPS via Caddy with a custom local domain (mimics production URL structure — useful for testing auth flows, cookies, etc.):

./scripts/launch.sh <domain>

This registers <domain>.localhost (landing) and app.<domain>.localhost (web + API) in the running Caddy instance. Caddy must be running first (setup.sh starts it).

Client: Check the build instructions in client/ and point it at the API URL printed by launch.sh (e.g. VIRTUE_BASE_API_URL=http://localhost:<port>).

More information about each component can be found in their respective subfolders.

Contributing

If you are interested in contributing, you can reach out to us at [email protected], or you can create an issue, comment on an issue or create a pull request. We also have a Discord channel where we discuss development and can provide help with using the app.

AI is permitted for writing code, but in general not permitted for writing text. All issues or pull requests should be human-written and site copy should also be human written, but the code itself can be generated with AI (but it still will be human reviewed).