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Running OpenCharacters on your own machine

Note that when you load up OpenCharacters via the usual URL, it is running locally on your machine - there is no server other than the github.io server that sends you the HTML/JavaScript files. Once the page has loaded, it's running completely locally on your machine, other than the requests to the OpenAI API, which are unavoidably non-local either way, unless you're using a non-OpenAI local model.

But if you want to also serve the HTML/JavaScript files from your own machine, you can use this guide. This might be handy if you want to completely opt-in to any updates to OpenCharacters, instead of receiving updates automatically when I update this code repository.

  1. Download this project as a zip file and unzip it
  2. Install the Web Server For Chrome web app/extension
  3. Launch the app and select the unzipped folder as shown in the intro video
  4. Important: Once you select the folder and switch on the server with the toggle, it'll show you a URL like http://127.0.0.1:8887, but you should change it to http://localhost:8887 because otherwise (due very strange engineering choices at Imgur HQ based on the "referrer" header), Imgur images won't load. So just swap the 127.0.0.1 part to localhost and that'll fix image loading problems.
  5. Visit the URL in your browser.

Note that chatacter URLs look like this: https://josephrocca.github.io/OpenCharacters/#%7B%22addCharac... but to use them with your local version you'll need to change them to this: http://localhost:8887/#%7B%22addCharac.... Replace http://localhost:8887 with whatever your webserver URL is (the 8887 number might be different). So, to be clear, just take a normal character share URL and swap https://josephrocca.github.io/OpenCharacters/ for http://localhost:8887/.

Notes

If you don't like the "Web Server For Chrome" app, you're free to use any sort of web server you like, of course. If you know the basics of using the command line, then there are lots of option. You can ask ChatGPT for help based on your operating system. Just ask it something like "I have a folder that I'd like to serve with a static web server on [your operating system] but I'm a noob, please give me detailed instructions on how to do that without jargon".

IMPORTANT: Your character/convo data is stored locally in your browser regardless of whether you serve it yourself, or use the official OpenCharacters URL. But note that a fresh database will be created for every URL that you serve on. For example, if you serve it at http://localhost:8887 and make some characters/convos, but then later serve it at http://localhost:3000, you'll get a fresh database. So you'll have to go back to the 8887 URL, export your data, and then import it to the 3000 URL. This is just how browsers work. Each "site" gets its own fresh database (otherwise any random site could read all your data from other sites). The 8887/3000 part is called the "port", and each port is treated as its own separate website, so it has its own local database/storage allocated by the browser.

If you want to use the command line, I'd recommend Deno because it allows you to give scripts very specific permissions (e.g. only allow access to the current folder). By default it doesn't give scripts any permissions - so scripts can't do anything to harm your computer - so Deno is like a web browser in that sense - you can run code safely, and decide whether or not to give permissions that it requests. Here's how to run a server in Deno:

# First install Deno: https://deno.land
# Then open a terminal in the unzipped folder (ask ChatGPT to help if you need - you'll need to tell it your operating system)
# Then run this:
deno run --allow-net=0.0.0.0:4507 --allow-read=. https://deno.land/std@0.180.0/http/file_server.ts
# Now open http://localhost:4507 in your browser.
  • The --allow-net=0.0.0.0:4507 part means "give this script access to the internet, but only to 0.0.0.0:4507 (i.e. localhost:4507) so it can serve the files there"
  • The --allow-read=. means "give this script the ability to read files on my filesystem, but only . - i.e. only the files in the current folder/directory"