cirax 0.6.0

The universal converter for people who read the privacy policy.
Don't upload. Convert.

Cirax turns your Linux machine into a conversion hub. One command reaches every format — not because Cirax reimplements codecs, but because it routes between the best engines ever written (FFmpeg, libvips, ImageMagick, LibreOffice, Pandoc, Calibre, 7-Zip, qpdf…) and chains them automatically. Files never leave your disk. Ever.

The Problem

1. Every online converter is a data breach waiting to happen. Your contracts, IDs, medical scans and family photos, uploaded to an anonymous ad-riddled server.
2. Local tools are islands. ffmpeg alone has a 40-page manual; LibreOffice won't talk to ImageMagick; your HEIC stays HEIC.
3. Format-pair explosions. 109 formats × 109 formats = 11,881 possible converters. Nobody writes those.

The Product

$ # what used to require three websites and a leap of faith:
$ cirax convert report.docx preview.png
● converting report.docx: application/vnd...document → image/png
  (libreoffice → pdftoppm, lossy)

$ # speech to subtitles, offline:
$ cirax convert talk.mp3 talk.srt

$ # AI-grade OCR — a 1.3B-parameter vision model, fully local:
$ cirax convert scan.png text.txt

Core Features

• Chain router — a Dijkstra search over a 109-format graph picks the best chain of engines for any pair, ranked by fidelity (lossless beats lossy) and tagged before it runs.
• 58 engines, one grammar — a declarative YAML registry wraps each engine; adding a format is a stanza, not a pull request.
• Sandboxed by default — every job runs in a bubblewrap jail: no network, read-only filesystem, writes confined to the workspace.
• Local AI OCR — GLM-OCR (MIT, ~1.3B params) via Ollama: layout-aware text + Markdown, zero cloud.
• Same-format ops — strip EXIF/GPS, fix line endings, transcode charsets.
• Watch & serve — convert folders as files land in them, or drive it from a local web UI / plain curl.

Quick Start

Installation

Cirax itself is tiny — the engines are your system packages. cirax doctor --show-missing prints exactly what to install.

First conversion

cirax doctor              # capability matrix of this machine
cirax plan report.docx    # every reachable target, with routes
cirax convert report.docx preview.png

Desktop app

Drag, drop, convert. The GUI speaks to the same sandboxed pipeline as the CLI and ships in every release artifact.

Engine installation

Architecture

flowchart LR
    A[CLI / GUI / Web / Watch] --> B[Job Engine]
    B --> C{Router}
    C --> D[Engine Registry YAML]
    C --> E[Engine 1]
    C --> F[Engine 2]
    C --> G[Engine n]
    E --> H[(bwrap jail)]
    F --> H
    G --> H
    H --> I[Output]

Inputs are detected with file(1) + an extension table; the router searches the capability graph up to three hops through pivot formats (PDF, PNG, WAV, JSON…); a job engine runs the chain inside a sandbox with per-engine concurrency, progress parsing and guaranteed cleanup.

Cirax vs. Online Converters

Supported Platforms

Contributing

Fork → branch (feat/…) → PR. Adding a conversion engine is a YAML stanza — see README section on engines in the docs and the existing specs under src/cirax/data/engines/.

Adding an Engine

Drop a YAML stanza in src/cirax/data/engines/ — inputs, outputs, a command template, optional per-format flags and presets — and the router picks it up. No code.

- engine: mycodec
  binary: mycodec
  package: mycodec
  presets:
    web: {flags: {image/myfmt: "-q 70"}}
  routes:
    - from: [image/png]
      to: [image/myfmt]
      lossless: true
      priority: 90
      command: "mycodec encode {input} {flags} {output}"

Built by Basel Anaya — Maximlabs.co