mimema

A self-hosted meme editor and media host: make a meme from a template, download the PNG, or publish it to a permanent, hotlinkable URL that unfurls in chat apps. It is meant for a group of friends, a team or a chat server that wants its own meme wall: one Node process, one SQLite file, one shared key for writing. Live at https://meme.avicenna.space.

Features

• About 260 templates with hand-placed captions. The importer pulls the imgflip and memegen.link packs; 115 popular templates carry a curated layout, so Drake's captions land in the right-hand column and Distracted Boyfriend's on the three people, each with a placeholder saying what goes there.
• A full editor. Move, resize and rotate text; five bundled meme fonts; outline and shadow; stickers from a file or pasted from the clipboard; a deep-fry filter; 60 steps of undo. The draft survives a reload.
• Exports at native resolution. The download is re-rendered at the template's own size, so it does not depend on how large the window was.
• Permanent links. A published file lives at /m/<slug>.<ext> and never changes; /m/<slug> is a share page with OpenGraph and Twitter card tags, so a pasted link previews as the image.
• The wall. Everything published, searchable by title, filterable by tag or template, sortable by reactions, with three emoji reactions anyone can add. Plain uploads (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, MP4, WebM) sit alongside memes.
• Your own templates. #/add-template takes any image and lets you draw up to 24 caption zones on it.
• Works on a phone. Below 900 px the forge becomes a canvas with bottom sheets, and the canvas stays visible while you type.
• Scriptable. A JSON API for uploads and listing, and a deep link that loads a template with captions so a headless browser can export the PNG.
• Optional text-to-meme relay. A separate daemon takes a chat transcript or the day's news, has a language model pick the template and write the captions, and publishes the result.

Install

Node 26 or later.

git clone https://github.com/ZahakJ/mimema && cd mimema && npm install
npm run templates && npm run templates:layouts   # fetch ~260 templates into data/
cp .env.example .env                             # set INVITE_KEY and PUBLIC_ORIGIN
npm run build && npm start                       # http://127.0.0.1:8001

openssl rand -base64 24 makes a suitable INVITE_KEY. For development, run npm run dev:server (API on :5900) and npm run dev (the client on http://localhost:5901, with hot reload).

Use

#/	The forge: pick a template, edit the captions, add stickers or paste an image, deep-fry, then download or publish.
#/wall	Everything published: search, filter by tag or template, sort by reactions, react, upload.
#/add-template	Draw caption zones on any image to make a template.
#/paper	The white paper.

Viewing and making memes need no key. Publishing, uploading, adding templates and deleting need INVITE_KEY, entered once in the app or sent as the x-meme-key header:

curl -H "x-meme-key: $INVITE_KEY" \
  -F file=@meme.png -F kind=meme -F title="Friday deploys" -F tags=ops,code \
  http://127.0.0.1:8001/api/items

Uploads are accepted up to 12 MB for images and 40 MB for video.

How it works

The client is a React app; the server is Hono, run by Node directly from TypeScript with no build step, keeping metadata in SQLite and files on disk under data/. A single canvas function, renderMeme, draws both the preview and the export. All geometry is stored as fractions of the image (a zone is x, y, w, h in 0..1, font size a fraction of the image height), so one document renders identically at any scale, and export simply draws again at native size. Text wraps greedily, then shrinks 8% at a time until it fits its box. Uploads are typed by their first bytes rather than the declared content type, deduplicated by SHA-256, and given an adjective-noun slug such as mysterious-gazebo. Writes need the key in a custom header; since the server sends no CORS headers, a cross-origin request carrying it fails its preflight. The relay never draws memes itself: it opens the forge's deep link in headless Chromium and calls the same export the download button uses.

Documentation

• Architecture: layout, data model, rendering, security, tests
• HTTP API: items, templates, media URLs, headless export
• Templates: import, curated layouts, duplicates, meanings
• Relay: the text-to-meme daemon
• Deployment: configuration, proxies, systemd, backups
• Contributing and security

License

MIT. Template images downloaded by npm run templates are not covered and belong to their owners. Fonts ship under their own open licenses.