Beaver

Beaver is a local-first legal workspace for research, document review, drafting, and tables of authorities, geared primarily for Canadian law. Account-free mode stores files and chats on disk; Supabase and cloud storage remain optional.

The checkout includes the Beaver web app, a shared legal-data layer, the universal legal-PDF engine, and the standalone/embedded Table of Authorities Maker.

Requirements

• Windows PowerShell
• Node.js 22.13+
• Python 3.11+
• npm
• A signed-in Codex CLI or one supported model-provider API key
• Optional: LibreOffice for Office-to-PDF conversion

Install

If OpenLegalData, TableOfAuthoritiesMaker, or universal-legal-pdf-engine is empty, restore it using the bundled-subrepository instructions.

Copy-Item backend\.env.example backend\.env
Copy-Item frontend\.env.local.example frontend\.env.local
npm ci
npm ci --prefix backend
npm ci --prefix frontend
python -m venv universal-legal-pdf-engine\.venv
.\universal-legal-pdf-engine\.venv\Scripts\python -m pip install -e .\universal-legal-pdf-engine

Keep AUTH_MODE=anonymous and NEXT_PUBLIC_AUTH_MODE=anonymous for local use. Replace DOWNLOAD_SIGNING_SECRET in backend\.env; add only the provider keys you use. A2AJ lookup and local Library storage do not require cloud accounts.

Build and run

npm run build --prefix backend
npm run build --prefix frontend
.\scripts\mike.ps1 doctor -WithTableOfAuthorities
.\scripts\mike.ps1 start -WithTableOfAuthorities
.\scripts\mike.ps1 smoke -WithTableOfAuthorities

Open http://127.0.0.1:3000. Stop only launcher-owned processes with:

.\scripts\mike.ps1 stop

For development, run npm run dev --prefix backend and npm run dev --prefix frontend in separate terminals.

Local databases, caches, and Library data default to %LOCALAPPDATA%\OpenLegalProducts\LegalData. Override that root with OPEN_LEGAL_DATA_HOME.

Documentation

• Documentation index
• Local subrepositories

License

AGPL-3.0-only.