Doory

What Doory does

Doory is a browser-based design editor for the everyday graphics that people usually make in Canva: social media posts and stories, posters and flyers, slides, invitations, resumes, YouTube thumbnails and business cards. You start from a template or a blank page, edit every element, and download the result. A single design can hold several pages, each with its own size, and a design can be resized to another format.

The editor covers most of what a non-designer needs. Text supports curved text, effects and font pairings; the element library includes shapes, lines, about 27,500 icons, emoji and illustrations, stickers and QR codes; photos can be cropped, masked, filtered and have their background removed by a small model that runs in the browser, so the image does not leave the device. Designs can be animated with enter, exit and emphasis effects and page transitions, given music, sound effects or a voiceover, and then presented or exported as MP4, WebM or GIF. Brand kits store a team’s colors, fonts and logos.

Collaboration and automation

Signed-in users can share a design through a link that allows viewing, commenting or editing, optionally protected by a password. Pinned comments, version history and real-time co-editing are all part of the open source code. Guests can design without an account; their work stays in the browser and moves to the server if they sign up.

For automated work, Doory includes a REST API and a Model Context Protocol server (off by default) that let scripts or AI assistants fill a template’s fields or create many designs from rows of data, with rate limits the operator can tune.

Self-hosting Doory

The project documents two installs: Docker Compose, building locally or pulling published images for amd64 and arm64, or a manual setup on Debian or Ubuntu with systemd and nginx, which needs Python 3.12, PostgreSQL and Node.js 22 to build the frontend. The stack is a React and Fabric.js frontend served by nginx, a Django API, a separate realtime service for co-editing, and PostgreSQL 16. Redis is only needed to run the realtime service on several workers, and a headless Chromium (about 400 MB) is included for print-quality PDF export on the server; other exports are made in the browser.

A fresh install starts empty. The operator downloads the content with management commands: fonts, the starter templates, the icon packs (about 120 to 130 MB), the background-removal model and audio. You also need to put a TLS reverse proxy in front that forwards WebSockets, create the admin account, and add the cleanup tasks to cron yourself.

Hosted version

The repository links to doory.art, an instance run by the author. The README states there is no paid plan, no locked features and no ads.

Limitations

Doory is very new. It has one release so far, version 0.1.0, and the README says the template library is small, with ten starter templates against the large catalogs of commercial tools. Teams will have to build their own templates in the admin site. There is no documented way to import Canva designs. The Attribution Assurance License is OSI-approved and allows commercial use, but anyone who redistributes or hosts it for others must show a visible credit to the author in the running app.

Who it suits

Doory suits small businesses, schools and organizations that want an in-house Canva-style editor for social and print graphics, keep their assets on their own server, and are willing to adopt a young project and supply their own templates. Teams designing app or website interfaces should look at Penpot instead.