Getting started

Get from zero to a searchable video on your machine. You need Docker, Node.js, and pnpm.

Prerequisites

pnpm (see root packageManager in package.json)
Docker: Postgres, Valkey, S3-compatible storage, and tusd run via Compose
An AI Gateway API key: used for embeddings and Whisper transcription

Install and run

From the repo root:

pnpm install
pnpm dev:all

That script builds shared packages, starts local infra (docker-compose.dev.yml), and runs the admin UI, indexer API, worker, and search API in parallel.

Set AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY in the environment for the server and worker processes (and search-api, which embeds queries). Model IDs come from your env (see .env.example).

End-to-end behavior is validated against the opinionated defaults: Gemini embeddings and Whisper for speech. If you swap in other models, check that model's docs for equivalent capabilities (video/image/text embed shapes, ASR output, size limits) and what the AI Gateway exposes for that provider.

First search

Open the admin UI (Vite client; typically proxied or on its own port in local mode).
Upload a short MP4, MOV, WebM, or AVI video (tus → object storage).
Pick a path and start processing:
- Multimodal: chunk + embed video segments
- Speech: extract audio → Whisper → embed transcript segments
- Vision: sample frames → embed images
- Hybrid: one shared segment grid → video + speech + vision embeds (fused RRF search)
Wait until the task shows complete (status polling in the UI).
Open that path's search page and try a natural-language query.

Each independent modality has its own process, search, and costs screens. Hybrid is a separate fourth path. Indexing one does not index the others.

Search from code

Once search-api is up (default publish port 3001 in deploy layouts):

import { SearchClient } from "search-client";

const client = new SearchClient({
  baseUrl: "http://localhost:3001",
});

const hits = await client.search({ query: "sunset over water", limit: 10 });
// or: client.searchHybrid({ query: "…", weights: { speech: 1.5 } })

See Search for transcript, frame, and hybrid methods.

Production-shaped deploys

Local pnpm dev:all is for development. For container deploys, use Self-contained or External.

Docs are published at https://sliceseeker.ashutoshbind.com/. To run the docs site locally:

pnpm --filter docs dev