CV Maker

A free, open source CV builder by Rami Mizyed. Write your CV with a live preview, pick one of four templates, tailor it to a job with AI, and download a real PDF. English, Turkish and Arabic (full RTL). No sign-up: your CV is saved in your own browser.

Live: https://cvmaker.ramimizyed.dev

Features

Editing

• Live preview that is the exact document you download, with page-break guides
• Autosave to your browser, plus undo and redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y)
• Drag to reorder sections, hide them, or rename their headings
• Sections: personal details, summary, experience, projects, education, skills, languages, certifications
• Photo upload (cropped and resized in the browser)
• JSON backup export and import (older CV Maker exports still import)

Design

• Templates: Classic, Modern (coloured sidebar), Minimal, and ATS-safe
• Accent colour, 15 bundled fonts (Latin and Arabic), text size, spacing, A4 or US Letter
• CV language setting (headings and text direction), independent of the site language

PDF export

The CV is printed from the browser, so the PDF has real, selectable text, working links, embedded fonts and correct Arabic shaping. Click Download PDF and choose Save as PDF in the print dialog.

AI tools (need an OpenAI key on the server)

• Tailor to a job: rewrites your summary and bullets and suggests skills. Each change is shown next to the original and only applied when you accept it.
• Import an existing CV from a PDF or pasted text (for example a LinkedIn profile)
• Cover letter writer, downloadable as a PDF with your CV's header

CV check (runs in the browser, free)

• Checklist for contact details, summary length, bullet count, numbers and results, strong verbs, length
• Keyword match against a pasted job description, with one-click "add to skills"

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/RamiMizyed/cv-maker.git
cd cv-maker
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Environment variables

Create .env.local:

# Required for the AI tools. Everything else works without it.
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...

# Optional
OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-4o-mini          # any chat model that supports JSON schema output
AI_RATE_LIMIT_PER_10_MIN=15       # AI requests per IP per 10 minutes

How the AI routes are protected

/api/ai/tailor, /api/ai/parse and /api/ai/cover-letter share a guard in src/lib/ai/server.ts:

• only same-origin requests are accepted
• request bodies are size-capped (80 KB JSON, 4 MB PDF) and prompts are clipped
• per-IP rate limit, token caps on every call, and the photo is never sent to the model
• the job ad and imported text are treated as untrusted input in the prompts

The rate limit is kept in memory, so on serverless hosting each instance counts separately. For a hard limit, add Vercel WAF rate limiting or a KV store in front of /api/ai, and set a monthly budget in the OpenAI dashboard.

Project structure

src/
  app/                     landing page, layout, API routes
  components/cv-maker/
    CVContext.tsx          state, undo/redo history, autosave
    document/              CVDocument (the one renderer), templates CSS, print root
    editor/                Content, Design and AI panels
    preview/               scaled live preview
  lib/
    cv/                    defaults, migration of old saves, analysis, helpers
    ai/                    server-side AI helpers
    translations.ts        EN / TR / AR strings

Deployment

Optimised for Vercel. Import the repo, add OPENAI_API_KEY as an environment variable, and deploy.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Please keep to the existing style (TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn/ui). New UI text needs an entry for all three languages in src/lib/translations.ts; the Translation type makes the build fail if one is missing.

License

MIT © Rami Mizyed