whiskr

whiskr is a private, self-hosted web chat interface for interacting with AI models via OpenRouter.

Features

Core Functionality

• Private & Self-Hosted: All your data is stored in indexedDB.
• Broad Model Support: Use any model available on your OpenRouter account.
• Real-time Responses: Get streaming responses from models as they are generated.
• Persistent Settings: Your chosen model, temperature, and other parameters are saved between sessions.
• Authentication: Optional user/password authentication for added security.
• Multimodal Output: If a model supports image output (for example, google/gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview), whiskr will request and render images alongside text. You can enable/disable this globally via settings.image-generation in config.yml (default: true).

• File Output: Models are able to emit text files themselves, which can be downloaded or previewed.

Conversation Control

• Full Message Control: Edit, delete, or copy any message in the conversation.
• Collapse/Expand Messages: Collapse large messages to keep your chat history tidy.
• Retry & Regenerate: Easily retry assistant responses or regenerate from any point in the conversation.
• Title Generation: Automatically generate (and refresh) a title for your chat.
• Import & Export: Save and load entire chats as local JSON files.

Rich UI & UX

• File Attachments: Attach text, code, or images to your messages for vision-enabled models.
• Reasoning & Transparency:
  • View the model's thought process and tool usage in an expandable "Reasoning" section.
  • See detailed statistics for each message: provider, time-to-first-token, tokens-per-second, token count, and cost.
  • Keep track of the total cost for the entire conversation.
• Advanced Model Search:
  • Tags indicate if a model supports tools, vision, or reasoning.
  • Fuzzy matching helps you quickly find the exact model you need.
• Smooth Interface: Built with morphdom to ensure UI updates don't lose your selections, scroll position, or focus.

Powerful Integrated Tools

• search_web: Search the web via Exa; returns up to 12 results with short summaries.
• fetch_contents: Fetch and summarize the contents of one or more URLs.
• github_repository: Get a comprehensive overview of a GitHub repository. The tool returns:
  • Core info (URL, description, stars, forks).
  • A list of top-level files and directories.
  • The full content of the repository's README file.

TODO

• restrict model list (optionally allow all for authenticated users)
• make authentication optional (unless no allowed models)
• improved custom prompts
• settings
  • auto-retry on edit
  • ctrl+enter vs enter for sending
• multiple chats

Built With

Frontend

• Vanilla JavaScript and CSS
• morphdom for DOM diffing without losing state
• marked for Markdown rendering
• highlight.js for syntax highlighting
• Fonts: Inter (UI), Comic Code (code)
• Icons: SVGRepo
• Color palette: Catppuccin Macchiato

Backend

• Go
• chi/v5 for the http routing/server
• OpenRouter for model list and completions
• Exa for web search and content retrieval (/search, /contents)

Getting Started

1. Copy example.config.yml to config.yml and set tokens.openrouter:

cp example.config.yml config.yml

2. Build and run:

go build -o whiskr
./whiskr

3. Open http://localhost:3443 in your browser.

Optional configuration notes (from config.yml):

• settings.image-generation (bool, default: true) - allow models with image output to generate images. If set to false, whiskr requests text-only responses even for image-capable models.
• settings.title-model (string, default: google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite) - model used to generate chat titles (requires structured output support).
• tokens.exa (optional) - enables the search tools; without it, web search is unavailable.
• tokens.github (optional) - increases GitHub API limits for the GitHub repository tool.

Authentication (optional)

whiskr supports simple, stateless authentication. If enabled, users must log in with a username and password before accessing the chat. Passwords are hashed using bcrypt (12 rounds). If authentication.enabled is set to false, whiskr will not prompt for authentication at all.

authentication:
  enabled: true
  users:
    - username: laura
      password: "$2a$12$cIvFwVDqzn18wyk37l4b2OA0UyjLYP1GdRIMYbNqvm1uPlQjC/j6e"
    - username: admin
      password: "$2a$12$mhImN70h05wnqPxWTci8I.RzomQt9vyLrjWN9ilaV1.GIghcGq.Iy"

After a successful login, whiskr issues a signed (HMAC-SHA256) token, using the server secret (tokens.secret in config.yml). This is stored as a cookie and re-used for future authentications.

Nginx (optional)

When running behind a reverse proxy like nginx, you can have the proxy serve static files.

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name chat.example.com;
    http2 on;

    root /path/to/whiskr/static;

    location / {
        index index.html index.htm;

        etag on;
        add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=2592000, must-revalidate";
        expires 30d;
    }

    location ~ ^/- {
        proxy_pass       http://127.0.0.1:3443;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host            $host;
    }

    ssl_certificate /path/to/cert.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/key.pem;
}

Usage

• Send a message with Ctrl+Enter or the send button.
• Hover over a message to reveal controls to edit, delete, copy, collapse, or retry.
• Click "Reasoning" on an assistant message to view the model's thought process or tool usage.
• Adjust model, temperature, prompt, or message role from the controls in the bottom-left.
• Attach images using markdown syntax (![alt](url)) or upload text/code files with the attachment button.
• When using an image-output model (e.g., google/gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview) and settings.image-generation is enabled, whiskr will display returned images inline.
• Use the buttons in the top-right to import/export the chat or clear all messages.

License

GPL-3.0 see LICENSE for details.