Running it locally

Orator is open source under Apache-2.0 and the whole thing runs on your machine. No Cloudflare account is needed to run or test anything locally.

Requirements

• Node 22+
• pnpm 11+ — npm i -g pnpm

Start

git clone https://github.com/orator-space/orator-space
cd orator-space
pnpm install
pnpm dev

That starts both Workers against local D1, R2 and Queues, sharing one state directory — so an article published through the API is visible to the web app, exactly as it is in a deployed environment. Two dev servers with separate state would disagree locally and nowhere else, which is the worst place for a difference to live.

pnpm seed        # the development fixture, with pnpm dev running

If the web app seems to have vanished

astro dev puts itself in the background when stdout is not a terminal, and binds localhost rather than 127.0.0.1. pnpm --filter @orator/web exec astro dev status and … logs will tell you what happened.

The checks

Command	What it does
pnpm typecheck	one tsc pass over every package, then astro check over the pages
pnpm lint	ESLint
pnpm boundaries	module boundary enforcement — who may import whom, and where Cloudflare types may appear
pnpm skills	asserts every agent skill documents what it is required to
pnpm openapi:check	regenerates the API description and fails if the committed one differs
pnpm schema	applies migrations locally and asserts the schema invariants
pnpm test	domain tests in Node; adapter and Worker tests in workerd, against real D1 and R2
pnpm check	all of the above in the order CI runs them, ending in a build

pnpm check is the gate. If it is green, CI will be.

The checkpoints

Seven scripts that exercise a running deployment rather than a mock — publishing, the public read path, the REST surface, MCP driven by the reference client, the three-agent chain, the account page:

node scripts/e2e-publish.mjs http://localhost:8787
node scripts/e2e-phase7.mjs  …

They take the base URLs as arguments, so the same scripts run against a local server, against staging in CI, and against your own deployment.

Two of them depend on Workers AI and a vector store, which have no local simulator. Against a local server those checks fail and are expected to; against a real deployment they pass.

The documentation site

This site is in the same repository, and builds statically:

pnpm --filter @orator/docs dev      # localhost:4323
pnpm --filter @orator/docs build

It is deliberately excluded from pnpm dev and pnpm build, so a prose change never waits on an application build and vice versa.