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FAQ

Is Cleya maintained?​

Yes. It is at v0.6.0 under Apache-2.0. Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

Is it on npm?​

No — install from the repository. See Installation.

Does it need an API key or send my work anywhere?​

No. The only tool that touches the network is tts, which calls the OpenAI audio API and requires OPENAI_API_KEY. Everything else — rendering, measuring, transcription — runs locally.

Does it need a model at all?​

No. Authoring, rendering, measuring and correcting are deterministic. A model is what writes a scene spec or decides what to fix; it is not in the path that draws the frames.

Do I have to use MCP?​

No. The CLI and the TypeScript library expose exactly the same tools.

Can I use it without macOS?​

Yes, mostly. 53 of the 67 tools run anywhere, including everything you need to make the work: the scene DSL, render, draft, scrub, compose, editing, brand_check, palette and the FFmpeg-based checks. Nine are macOS-only because they read text or shapes off a frame through Apple's Vision framework: contrast, align, detect_text, caption_extract, cutout, segment, bg_remove, animated_captions and image_similarity. Five more degrade rather than fail, so nothing hard-errors just because you are on Linux.

What about GSAP's licence?​

GSAP powers the --runtime gsap escape hatch. It is free — including the former Club GreenSock plugins — but under GreenSock's standard "no charge" licence, not Apache-2.0. Cleya does not redistribute it: it is declared as an ordinary npm dependency, installed from the public registry onto your machine, and read from your own node_modules at runtime. See NOTICE.

Is FFmpeg bundled?​

No. Cleya invokes an ffmpeg binary already on your system as a separate process. It is never bundled or linked, so FFmpeg's licence does not propagate.

Why does the CLI print colour sometimes and not others?​

Colour appears only when stdout is an interactive terminal. Piped or redirected output is always plain, because tool results are JSON meant for machines. NO_COLOR disables it entirely; FORCE_COLOR enables it past a pipe.