Zora

Note: This is currently a personal research project built in my free time.

Zora is a local-first records system for personal and household artifacts. It preserves original evidence, extracts searchable text, and uses AI as an interpreter over cited sources.

The first product bet is simple:

The briefing earns the archive.

If Zora cannot produce a weekly briefing worth reading, no amount of memory, reminders, or assistant behavior will save it. The first real vertical slice therefore focuses on ingesting a local watch folder, preserving raw artifacts (PDFs, images, dropped files, optionally exported .eml messages), indexing extracted text, and generating a source-linked briefing for a chosen seven-day window.

Design Docs

• DESIGN.md is the design index.
• docs/design/zora_design_guide.md is the canonical product guide.
• docs/design/v0_implementation_guide.md is the concrete v0 implementation guide.

Current State

The first durable ingest slice is implemented:

• YAML configuration with local development defaults.
• SQLite migration plumbing.
• A localhost HTTP server.
• A health endpoint.
• A server-rendered HTML shell.
• Queue-backed watch folder ingest.
• Docling-backed extraction for PDFs and images.
• GoReleaser packaging for native binary and .deb artifacts.

Native Setup

Zora is intended to run as a native local service. The Go binary stays CGO-free, Docling runs out-of-process in a Python virtual environment, and SQLite/files live on the host filesystem.

For the full local workflow, see docs/local-dev.md.

On macOS:

make setup-macos

On Ubuntu:

make setup-ubuntu

The macOS bootstrap uses Brewfile, including Ollama. The Ubuntu bootstrap uses apt for host packages, installs Ollama unless ZORA_SKIP_OLLAMA_SETUP=1, and installs docling-serve[ui] into /opt/zora/docling.

Run Locally

Optionally pull the default local model before generating action items:

make llm-pull

make dev

Then open:

• http://127.0.0.1:8787/
• http://127.0.0.1:8787/healthz
• http://127.0.0.1:8787/action-items
• http://127.0.0.1:5001/docs
• http://127.0.0.1:5001/ui

The example config writes local development state under .local/, which is ignored by git.

For separate service logs, run make run-docling, make run-ollama, and make run-zora in separate terminals.

Local dev defaults to the fast gemma4:e2b-it-q4_K_M model. For a slower but stronger local ingest pass on 16GB+ Macs, use qwen3.5:9b-q4_K_M and update llm.model in your active config.

Package

GoReleaser builds local release artifacts:

make test
make package-check
make package-snapshot

Snapshot output is written to dist/, including macOS/Linux tarballs, checksums, and Ubuntu .deb packages. The packaged Ubuntu defaults are:

• Config: /etc/zora/config.yaml
• Data: /var/lib/zora
• Binary: /usr/bin/zora
• Services: zora.service and docling-serve.service

Docling is not bundled into the Zora package. Install it with the Ubuntu bootstrap before starting docling-serve.service.

Check build metadata with:

make version

Test

make test

License

Zora is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.