twarc

The World of Anime, Rated & Curated.

A free, halal-friendly anime platform — catalog with ratings + characters, hand-drawn fan-art gallery, watchlists, blogs, and threaded discussion. All SFW. All human-curated. No AI slop.

Try it now → twarc.net

---

What twarc is

twarc is an anime community site with strict content standards: safe for work, human-made art only, no AI-generated images. It's built for people who love anime as a craft and want a clean place to browse, list, discuss, and share.

• Catalog — thousands of anime with synopsis, MAL rank, year, episodes, studios, genres, full character roster, and streaming-platform links.
• Characters — portrait pages with the anime they appear in and any community art.
• Lists — Watching / Plan to Watch / Completed / On Hold / Dropped + favorites.
• Fan art — every upload is moderator-reviewed before publish.
• Blog — long-form essays with a real editor (images, formatting, links).
• Comments — threaded replies with @-mentions and real-time notifications.
• Achievements — Steam-style milestones on your profile.

Roadmap and feature debates happen in Discussions — please weigh in.

Why open source it

The fan-art / anime-curation space has been hostile to open communities for years: ad-supported sites get aggressive, AI-generated content has flooded the catalog, and the better tools are walled-off. twarc is open source so the community can audit the moderation rules, fork it if we ever drift, and contribute features that wouldn't exist if we were doing this alone.

Tech stack

Layer	Pick
API	Laravel 13 (PHP 8.5), Sanctum SPA cookies, Horizon, Scout
Web	Next.js 16 App Router, Tailwind v4, TypeScript strict
DB	Postgres 18 with pg_trgm, btree_gin, citext, pgcrypto
Cache + queue	Redis + Horizon
Search	Meilisearch v1.10 (Postgres trigram for autocomplete)
Images	imgproxy (libvips) on-the-fly variants, content-addressed paths
Storage	Local in dev, Backblaze B2 + Bunny CDN in prod
Layout	pnpm + Turborepo monorepo

Architecture notes are in docs/architecture/.

Repo layout

apps/
  api/          Laravel 13 — REST/JSON API, mod queue, jobs
  web/          Next.js 16 — public site
infra/
  docker/       compose.dev.yml — Meilisearch + imgproxy
  terraform/    (deferred)
docs/
  architecture/ system + data-model docs
  legal/        DMCA + privacy reference text
  runbooks/     prod operations
packages/       (reserved for shared TS/PHP packages)

Quickstart — local dev

Prereqs: PHP 8.3+, Node 20+, pnpm, Postgres 15+, Redis, Docker.

# 1. Clone + install
git clone https://github.com/twarc-net/twarc.git
cd twarc
pnpm install

# 2. Bring up Meilisearch + imgproxy
cp infra/docker/.env.example infra/docker/.env
# edit infra/docker/.env — fill in MEILI_MASTER_KEY / IMGPROXY_KEY / IMGPROXY_SALT
docker compose -f infra/docker/compose.dev.yml --env-file infra/docker/.env up -d

# 3. Laravel API
cd apps/api
cp .env.example .env
composer install
php artisan key:generate
# create the DB once: sudo -u postgres createdb twarc && createuser twarc -P
php artisan migrate --seed
php artisan serve --host=127.0.0.1 --port=8000

# 4. Next.js web (in a new shell, from repo root)
cd apps/web
cp .env.example .env.local
pnpm dev
# → open http://localhost:3000

A fuller walkthrough with troubleshooting is in docs/runbooks/local-dev.md.

Self-host with Docker (90 seconds)

Point a domain at a VPS, clone the repo, fill in a .env, and:

docker compose --env-file .env pull
docker compose --env-file .env up -d

That pulls pre-built multi-arch images from ghcr.io/twarc-net/twarc-{api,web} and brings up the whole stack — FrankenPHP + Laravel, Next.js, Postgres, Redis, Meilisearch, imgproxy, Horizon, scheduler — with automatic HTTPS via Let's Encrypt. No build step. No nginx config. No certbot.

Step-by-step (incl. backups, updates, build-from-source variant, image provenance verification) in docs/runbooks/docker-deploy.md.

Contributing

PRs, bug reports, and ideas are all welcome. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md for setup conventions, commit-message style, and what we look for in a review.

Good first issues are labeled good first issue.

Content policy

twarc is intentionally narrow:

• Halal-friendly, SFW only. No NSFW content. The Danbooru rating vocabulary is filtered server-side (HalalGuard).
• No AI-generated images. Reports get acted on; repeat uploaders get banned.
• Hand-drawn / human-made fan art only.

These are non-negotiable. Don't open a PR asking us to loosen them — it'll be closed.

Security

Found a vulnerability? Please don't open a public issue. See SECURITY.md for our private disclosure process.

License

AGPL-3.0-only. If you run a modified version on a public server, you're required to share your modifications back. This is intentional — it keeps forks honest and the community in the loop.

---

Made by humans, for anime fans.
_{If you ship a fork, link back — we'd love to see what people build.}