Standalone Editor

The standalone editor is a local, single-user visual editor for Octo flows. It reads and writes plain *.yaml files in a directory on your disk, and runs them with the bundled octo binary — no database, no account, no orchestrator.

The fastest way to get it is the published Docker image:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v "$PWD:/work" juancavallotti/octo

Open http://localhost:3000 and you are editing the YAML files in your current directory. See Running from Docker for the details, or the editor quickstart for a guided first run.

A tour of the UI

The editor is one screen: a header, the workspace, and a console docked at the bottom.

Header

• Flow title — editable inline. The name becomes the *.yaml filename on the first save; renaming a saved flow renames the file on disk.
• Open / new menu — lists every YAML file in your mounted directory and opens one, or starts a blank flow. The store is flat: files live directly in the directory, with no folders.
• View toggle — switches the workspace between the visual Design view, a read-only YAML preview of the exact document that will be saved, and a Resources view for the flow's env files and templates.
• Save and Run — Save writes the YAML to your directory; Run starts the flow with the bundled runtime. See Running flows.

Palette

The left sidebar lists the flow blocks, grouped into collapsible sections with a filter box. Click or drag one to add it to the active flow.

The palette is not hardcoded: it is generated from the runtime's capability schema (octo schema), so the editor always offers exactly what the bundled octo binary can run. See How it works.

Canvas

The center canvas shows the integration: launchers along the top manage its connections, declared environment variables, and resources, and each flow is a board of source and block cards you reorder by drag and drop. Selecting a card opens it in the settings panel.

Settings panel

The right panel edits the selected connection, source, or block. Its forms are also driven by the capability schema — each setting renders the right field for its declared type, including CEL expression fields with completion and an inline expression tester.

Console

The bottom panel docks a tabbed console: Logs streams the output of a running flow live, and Dev .env edits local-only values for the flow's declared environment variables. It expands automatically when a run starts and can be resized or collapsed.

Who it's for

Use the standalone editor to try Octo and to develop flows locally: your flows are ordinary files you can run with the CLI, commit to git, and iterate on with hot reload. The Docker image also exposes an MCP server at /mcp, so an AI assistant can author and run flows against the same directory — see MCP authoring.

When you need multiple users, deployments, secrets management, and persistence beyond local disk, move to the platform — it embeds the same editor, backed by the orchestrator instead of your filesystem, so flows built standalone carry over as-is.