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La Suite Docs : Collaborative Text Editing

Docs, where your notes can become knowledge through live collaboration.

Why use Docs ❓

Docs is a collaborative text editor designed to address common challenges in knowledge building and sharing.

It offers a scalable and secure alternative to tools such as Google Docs, Notion (without the dbs), Outline, or Confluence.

Write

• 😌 Get simple, accessible online editing for your team.
• 💅 Create clean documents with beautiful formatting options.
• 🖌️ Focus on your content using either the in-line editor, or the Markdown syntax.
• 🧱 Quickly design your page thanks to the many block types, accessible from the / slash commands, as well as keyboard shortcuts.
• 🔌 Write offline! Your edits will be synced once you're back online.
• ✨ Save time thanks to our AI actions, such as rephrasing, summarizing, fixing typos, translating, etc. You can even turn your selected text into a prompt!

Work together

• 🤝 Enjoy live editing! See your team collaborate in real time.
• 🔒 Keep your information secure thanks to granular access control. Only share with the right people.
• 📑 Export your content in multiple formats (.odt, .docx, .pdf) with customizable templates.
• 📚 Turn your team's collaborative work into organized knowledge with Subpages.

Self-host

🚀 Docs is easy to install on your own servers

Available methods: Helm chart, Nix package

In the works: Docker Compose, YunoHost

⚠️ For the PDF and Docx export Docs relies on XL packages from BlockNote licenced in AGPL-3.0 which are not MIT compatible. You can perfectly use Docs without these packages by setting the environment variable PUBLISH_AS_MIT to true, and that way you'll build an image of the application without the features that are not MIT compatible. If you run Docs PUBLISH_AS_MIT set to false make sure you fulfill your BlockNote licensing or sponsorship obligations.

Getting started 🔧

Test it

You can test Docs on your browser by visiting this demo document

Run Docs locally

⚠️ The methods described below for running Docs locally is for testing purposes only. It is based on building Docs using Minio as an S3-compatible storage solution. Of course you can choose any S3-compatible storage solution.

Prerequisite

Make sure you have a recent version of Docker and Docker Compose installed on your laptop, then type:

$ docker -v

Docker version 20.10.2, build 2291f61

$ docker compose version

Docker Compose version v2.32.4

⚠️ You may need to run the following commands with sudo, but this can be avoided by adding your user to the local docker group.

Project bootstrap

The easiest way to start working on the project is to use GNU Make:

$ make bootstrap FLUSH_ARGS='--no-input'

This command builds the app container, installs dependencies, performs database migrations and compiles translations. It's a good idea to use this command each time you are pulling code from the project repository to avoid dependency-related or migration-related issues.

Your Docker services should now be up and running 🎉

You can access to the project by going to http://localhost:3000.

You will be prompted to log in. The default credentials are:

username: impress
password: impress

📝 Note that if you need to run them afterwards, you can use the eponym Make rule:

$ make run

⚠️ For the frontend developer, it is often better to run the frontend in development mode locally.

To do so, install the frontend dependencies with the following command:

$ make frontend-development-install

And run the frontend locally in development mode with the following command:

$ make run-frontend-development

To start all the services, except the frontend container, you can use the following command:

$ make run-backend

Adding content

You can create a basic demo site by running this command:

$ make demo

Finally, you can check all available Make rules using this command:

$ make help

Django admin

You can access the Django admin site at:

http://localhost:8071/admin.

You first need to create a superuser account:

$ make superuser

Feedback 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️

We'd love to hear your thoughts, and hear about your experiments, so come and say hi on Matrix.

Roadmap

Want to know where the project is headed? 🗺️ Checkout our roadmap

Licence 📝

This work is released under the MIT License (see LICENSE).

While Docs is a public-driven initiative, our licence choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.

Contributing 🙌

This project is intended to be community-driven, so please, do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any question related to our implementation or design decisions.

You can help us with translations on Crowdin.

If you intend to make pull requests, see CONTRIBUTING for guidelines.

Directory structure:

docs
├── bin - executable scripts or binaries that are used for various tasks, such as setup scripts, utility scripts, or custom commands.
├── crowdin - for crowdin translations, a tool or service that helps manage translations for the project.
├── docker - Dockerfiles and related configuration files used to build Docker images for the project. These images can be used for development, testing, or production environments.
├── docs - documentation for the project, including user guides, API documentation, and other helpful resources.
├── env.d/development - environment-specific configuration files for the development environment. These files might include environment variables, configuration settings, or other setup files needed for development.
├── gitlint - configuration files for `gitlint`, a tool that enforces commit message guidelines to ensure consistency and quality in commit messages.
├── playground - experimental or temporary code, where developers can test new features or ideas without affecting the main codebase.
└── src - main source code directory, containing the core application code, libraries, and modules of the project.

Credits ❤️

Stack

Docs is built on top of Django Rest Framework, Next.js, BlockNote.js, HocusPocus and Yjs. We thank the contributors of all these projects for their awesome work!

We are proud sponsors of BlockNotejs and Yjs.

Gov ❤️ open source

Docs is the result of a joint effort led by the French 🇫🇷🥖 (DINUM) and German 🇩🇪🥨 governments (ZenDiS).

We are always looking for new public partners (we are currently onboarding the Netherlands 🇳🇱🧀), feel free to reach out if you are interested in using or contributing to Docs.