Simple AI and LLM product directory for basic SEO.
Fixed categories, thin tool records, honest sitemap freshness.

Live site: https://drose.io/aitools

Quick Links

• Live site
• Reset spec
• Local development

AI Tools Website

AI Tools Website powers drose.io/aitools, a slim directory of AI and LLM products.

The project used to behave like an autonomous content machine. It now does something smaller and more defensible: publish clean tool pages, fixed category pages, and honest sitemaps from a normalized public catalog.

At A Glance

Area	Current shape
Live product	Directory homepage, fixed category pages, tool pages
Stack	FastHTML + Python
Storage	MinIO in production, local JSON in development
Deploy	Coolify on clifford
Scheduler	Sauron
Active production jobs	aitools-sitemaps, aitools-umami-watchdog

What This Repo Ships

• directory homepage for AI and LLM products
• fixed category pages
• thin tool pages with normalized metadata
• publish policy and junk blocking
• sitemap generation
• Umami analytics wiring

What This Repo Explicitly Does Not Ship

• autonomous editorial rewrites
• comparison farms
• daily recategorization churn
• traffic tiering as publish control
• fake freshness timestamps
• AI-written digest emails

Operating Principles

Principle	Meaning
Fixed taxonomy	Categories do not drift daily.
Thin public records	Every published tool is projected into a small, consistent schema.
Honest freshness	updated_at and sitemap lastmod only move when public content changes.
Cheap runtime	Production only keeps the jobs that still matter.
Policy first	Junk, cheats, and risky pages should not leak into the public directory.

Public Catalog

Published tools are projected by ai_tools_website/v1/public_catalog.py into a thin public record:

• name
• slug
• canonical_url
• summary
• category
• tags
• source_type
• source_url
• metrics
• status
• risk_flags
• discovered_at
• updated_at
• content_hash

The rendering layer only needs that thin record plus the publish policy in ai_tools_website/v1/editorial.py.

Repo Map

• ai_tools_website/v1/web.py: homepage, category pages, tool pages, SEO metadata
• ai_tools_website/v1/public_catalog.py: slim public projection
• ai_tools_website/v1/editorial.py: publish policy, tool status, junk blocking
• ai_tools_website/v1/maintenance.py: maintenance CLI, including slim-reset
• ai_tools_website/v1/sitemap_builder.py: sitemap generation and publish
• SLIM_DIRECTORY_RESET.md: first-principles reset spec

Local Development

uv sync
uv run uvicorn "ai_tools_website.v1.web:app" --reload --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

Open http://localhost:8000/aitools.

Core Commands

# Preview the slim public projection without persisting it
uv run python -m ai_tools_website.v1.maintenance slim-reset --dry-run --json-output

# Persist the slim public projection
uv run python -m ai_tools_website.v1.maintenance slim-reset

# Rebuild sitemaps
uv run python -m ai_tools_website.v1.sitemap_builder

# Run the test suite
uv run pytest

# Lint the codebase
uv run ruff check ai_tools_website tests

Configuration

See .env.example for a working baseline.

Core runtime settings:

• WEB_PORT
• LOG_LEVEL
• BASE_PATH
• SERVICE_URL_WEB
• AITOOLS_STORAGE_BACKEND
• AITOOLS_LOCAL_DATA_DIR
• TOOLS_FILE
• AITOOLS_SLUG_REGISTRY_FILE
• MINIO_ENDPOINT
• MINIO_ACCESS_KEY
• MINIO_SECRET_KEY
• MINIO_BUCKET_NAME
• MINIO_PUBLIC_URL
• UMAMI_WEBSITE_ID
• UMAMI_SCRIPT_SRC
• UMAMI_DOMAINS
• UMAMI_DROSE_ID

Legacy discovery and content-generation modules still reference model and API settings such as OPENAI_API_KEY, TAVILY_API_KEY, SEARCH_MODEL, MAINTENANCE_MODEL, CONTENT_ENHANCER_MODEL, and WEB_SEARCH_MODEL. Those are not required for the normal slim-directory runtime.

Deployment Notes

• Coolify deploys both the web container and the updater container.
• Sauron executes maintenance commands inside the updater container with docker exec.
• The web process keeps an in-memory tools cache. After changing tools.json, redeploy the app or hit the homepage to refresh listings.
• Container-to-LiteLLM traffic should use http://litellm-proxy:4000, not the public hostname.