/outline

The fastest wiki and knowledge base for growing teams. Beautiful, feature rich, and markdown compatible.

Primary LanguageJavaScriptOtherNOASSERTION

An open, extensible, wiki for your team built using React and Node.js.
Try out Outline using our hosted version at www.getoutline.com.
screenshot

This is the source code that runs Outline and all the associated services. If you want to use Outline then you don't need to run this code, we offer a hosted version of the app at getoutline.com.

If you'd like to run your own copy of Outline or contribute to development then this is the place for you.

Installation

Outline requires the following dependencies:

  • Node.js >= 12
  • Yarn
  • Postgres >=9.5
  • Redis >= 4
  • AWS S3 bucket or compatible API for file storage
  • Slack, Google, Azure, or OIDC application for authentication

Self-Hosted Production

Docker

For a manual self-hosted production installation these are the recommended steps:

  1. First setup Redis and Postgres servers, this is outside the scope of the guide.

  2. Download the latest official Docker image, new releases are available around the middle of every month:

    docker pull outlinewiki/outline

  3. Using the .env.sample as a reference, set the required variables in your production environment. You can export the environment variables directly, or create a .env file and pass it to the docker image like so:

    docker run --env-file=.env outlinewiki/outline

  4. Setup the database with yarn db:migrate. Production assumes an SSL connection to the database by default, if Postgres is on the same machine and is not SSL you can migrate with yarn db:migrate --env=production-ssl-disabled, for example:

    docker run --rm outlinewiki/outline yarn db:migrate

  5. Start the container:

    docker run outlinewiki/outline

  6. Visit http://you_server_ip:3000 and you should be able to see Outline page

    Port number can be changed using the PORT environment variable

  7. (Optional) You can add an nginx or other reverse proxy to serve your instance of Outline for a clean URL without the port number, support SSL, etc.

Terraform

Alternatively a community member maintains a script to deploy Outline on Google Cloud Platform with Terraform & Ansible.

Upgrading

Docker

If you're running Outline with Docker you'll need to run migrations within the docker container after updating the image. The command will be something like:

docker run --rm outlinewiki/outline:latest yarn db:migrate

Git

If you're running Outline by cloning this repository, run the following command to upgrade:

yarn run upgrade

Local Development

For contributing features and fixes you can quickly get an environment running using Docker by following these steps:

  1. Install these dependencies if you don't already have them
    1. Docker for Desktop
    2. Node.js (v12 LTS preferred)
    3. Yarn
  2. Clone this repo
  3. Register a Slack app at https://api.slack.com/apps
  4. Copy the file .env.sample to .env
  5. Fill out the following fields:
    1. SECRET_KEY (follow instructions in the comments at the top of .env)
    2. SLACK_KEY (this is called "Client ID" in Slack admin)
    3. SLACK_SECRET (this is called "Client Secret" in Slack admin)
  6. Configure your Slack app's Oauth & Permissions settings
    1. Slack recently prevented the use of http protocol for localhost. For local development, you can use a tool like ngrok or a package like mkcert. (How to use HTTPS for local development)
    2. Add https://my_ngrok_address/auth/slack.callback as an Oauth redirect URL and update the URL env var to match
    3. Ensure that the bot token scope contains at least users:read
  7. Run make up. This will download dependencies, build and launch a development version of Outline

Contributing

Outline is built and maintained by a small team – we'd love your help to fix bugs and add features!

Before submitting a pull request please let the core team know by creating or commenting in an issue on GitHub, and we'd also love to hear from you in the Discussions. This way we can ensure that an approach is agreed on before code is written. This will result in a much higher liklihood of code being accepted.

If you’re looking for ways to get started, here's a list of ways to help us improve Outline:

  • Translation into other languages
  • Issues with good first issue label
  • Performance improvements, both on server and frontend
  • Developer happiness and documentation
  • Bugs and other issues listed on GitHub

Architecture

If you're interested in contributing or learning more about the Outline codebase please refer to the architecture document first for a high level overview of how the application is put together.

Debugging

In development Outline outputs simple logging to the console, prefixed by categories. In production it outputs JSON logs, these can be easily parsed by your preferred log ingestion pipeline.

HTTP logging is disabled by default, but can be enabled by setting the DEBUG=http environment variable.

Tests

We aim to have sufficient test coverage for critical parts of the application and aren't aiming for 100% unit test coverage. All API endpoints and anything authentication related should be thoroughly tested.

To add new tests, write your tests with Jest and add a file with .test.js extension next to the tested code.

# To run all tests
make test

# To run backend tests in watch mode
make watch

Once the test database is created with make test you may individually run frontend and backend tests directly.

# To run backend tests
yarn test:server

# To run frontend tests
yarn test:app

Migrations

Sequelize is used to create and run migrations, for example:

yarn sequelize migration:generate --name my-migration
yarn sequelize db:migrate

Or to run migrations on test database:

yarn sequelize db:migrate --env test

License

Outline is BSL 1.1 licensed.