Verse

An open-source workspace for real-time collaboration — shared documents, live coding rooms with video, and a whiteboard, all in one place.

Verse lets teams create together in the same moment: write documents with live cursors, or spin up a Live Session to pair-program, run an interview, or teach — a shared code editor, a collaborative whiteboard, and built-in video.

Verse began as a fork of noahskorner/google-docs-clone and has since been substantially reworked — the collaboration engine, the Live Session feature, and the whole product design are new. Credit to the original author for the starting point.

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Features

📄 Documents

• Real-time collaborative rich-text editing (Quill) with live cursors and presence
• Conflict-free merging via CRDT — no overwrites, no "reload to sync"
• Share by email or link, with per-document access
• Word count / reading time, autosave

🟢 Live Sessions

• Join-by-link rooms for pair programming, interviews, and teaching
• Collaborative code editor (CodeMirror 6) with language selection, shared cursors, and starter templates
• Run code (JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C/C++) via paiza.io with room-wide shared output — plus test cases (stdin → expected stdout) everyone can edit and run
• Collaborative whiteboard (tldraw) to sketch and explain
• Peer-to-peer video & audio (WebRTC) with mic/cam controls
• Dark / light session theme, participant list, session timer

🔧 Under the hood

• Real-time layer built on Yjs relayed over authenticated Socket.IO
• Self-hostable — your data, your server

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Tech stack

Frontend — React 18 · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS · Quill + y-quill (docs) · CodeMirror 6 + y-codemirror.next (code) · tldraw (whiteboard) · simple-peer (WebRTC) · Yjs · Socket.IO client

Backend — Node · Express · TypeScript · Socket.IO · Yjs · Sequelize · PostgreSQL · JWT auth (access + refresh) · Nodemailer

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Getting started (local)

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• Docker (for Postgres + a local mail catcher)

1. Start Postgres and a mail catcher

docker run -d --name verse-pg \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=verse -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=verse -e POSTGRES_DB=verse \
  -p 5433:5432 postgres:16

docker run -d --name verse-mail -p 1025:1025 -p 1080:1080 maildev/maildev

2. Backend

cd server
npm install

Create server/.env.development (see all required keys in server/src/config/env.config.ts):

NODE_ENV=development
HOST=localhost
PORT=3001

DATABASE_URL=postgres://verse:verse@localhost:5433/verse
USER=verse
PASSWORD=verse
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=5433
DATABASE=verse

# Local mail catcher (read messages at http://localhost:1080)
SMTP_HOST=localhost
SMTP_PORT=1025
SMTP_SECURE=false
SMTP_USER=dev
SMTP_PASSWORD=dev

ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=change_me
ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRATION=15m
REFRESH_TOKEN_SECRET=change_me
REFRESH_TOKEN_EXPIRATION=7d
VERIFY_EMAIL_SECRET=change_me
PASSWORD_RESET_SECRET=change_me
PASSWORD_RESET_EXPIRATION=1h

FRONT_END_URL=http://localhost:3000

# Optional: skip email verification (users are verified on signup)
AUTO_VERIFY_USERS=true

# Optional: enable "Sign in with Google" (create an OAuth client in Google
# Cloud Console; also set REACT_APP_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID for the client)
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=your-client-id.apps.googleusercontent.com

Build and run (tables auto-create on first boot):

npm run build
npm start           # http://localhost:3001

3. Frontend

cd client
npm install
npm start           # http://localhost:3000

Open http://localhost:3000, register, and start writing — or hit Start a live session.

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Architecture

• Documents and Live Sessions both use Yjs (CRDT) for state, relayed as binary updates over Socket.IO. The server keeps an authoritative doc per document/room and persists documents to Postgres.
• Live Sessions run over a dedicated /room Socket.IO namespace that relays multiple Yjs docs (code + whiteboard), presence, and WebRTC signaling for peer-to-peer video.
• Auth is JWT-based (short-lived access token + refresh token); rooms are authenticated with the same token.

Note: the real-time doc/room state is held in memory, so the backend currently runs as a single instance. Horizontal scaling would use a shared provider (e.g. Hocuspocus + Redis).

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Deployment

The repo includes a render.yaml blueprint (Postgres + Node API + static frontend). The frontend needs REACT_APP_API_URL set to the API URL (with a trailing slash); the API needs FRONT_END_URL set to the frontend origin (for CORS). WebRTC video requires HTTPS, which hosts like Render provide.