Dockerized OpenSlides

This is a dockerized version of OpenSlides. You can use it to host small meetings for your club or small bussiness. It is recommended for ~10 concurrent users (users who interact with the software at the very same time), so it should work for gatherings with up to 30 persons.

Get it up and running

This tutorial will guide you through the installation process step by step. All commands are run in the terminal, so you should have a basic understanding how to interact with your computer via the command line.

The following steps need to be executed on the computer you want to run OpenSlides on!

Install Docker

This setup of OpenSlides runs inside a Docker container, so make sure that Docker is installed on the computer.

You'll find installation instructions for your operating system here: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/

Get the source code

There's several options how to get the source code to your computer depending on what tools you are used to.

A) Clone the repository

If you have Git installed on your computer, you can clone the repository:

$ git clone [email protected]:frederikheld/openslides-dockerized.git

This will create the folder openslides-dockerized and copy the source code into it.

B) wget

If you are on a UNIX system, you most likely have access to wget. You can use it to download the Dockerfile from the repository. Make sure to create the directory openslides-dockerized first.

$ mkdir openslides-dockerized
$ cd openslides-dockerized
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frederikheld/openslides-dockerized/master/Dockerfile

C) manual copy & paste

If you are not familiar with such kinds of tools, you can copy & paste the source code manually.

1. Create a folder openslides-dockerized
2. Open https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frederikheld/openslides-dockerized/master/Dockerfile in your browser
3. Select "Save page as..." from the menu and save the page into the folder openslides-dockerized. Make sure you choose the name Dockerfile (without a file type extension!) for the file before you save it!

Create shared directory

We will use a shared directory to exchange data between the Docker container and your computer. This is important, as all data you add to OpenSlides (user accounts, agenda, etc.) will be stored inside the container. As the container is self-contained, all data will be lost if you stop the container, unless you transfer it to your computer outside of the container. A shared directory is the simplest way to do so.

Inside openslides-dockerized, create a new directory data. This is the directory we will use below when starting the container. If you understand how this works, you can choose whatever directory you want!

First start

The file Dockerfile describes a Docker image. This needs to be built first before it can be run as a Docker container. So you have two steps ahead. Make sure that the first one is run inside the directory openslides-dockerized.

$ docker build --tag openslides:latest .
$ docker run --name openslides -p 8000:8000 --volume $(pwd)/data:/app/personal_data openslides:latest

Depending on your Docker installation, you might need to run those commands with sudo privileges.

If you want to run the container in the background (which allows you to close the terminal and keep OpenSlides running), you can add -d to the list of parameters of docker run.

Stop & re-start the container

Usually Docker containers are made to run for a long time. But there might be reasons why you want to stop the container and re-start it later. It could also occur that the container stops due to unforseen reasons and you need to re-start it.

Stopping the container is simply done with the following command:

$ docker stop openslides

Given that you don't remove the stopped container or the data directory, you can re-start the container and it will pick up where you left it with:

$ docker start openslides

Re-starting the container is also necessary if you change the OpenSlides configuration in openslides-dockerized/data/var/settings.py! You can stop the container with

$ docker stop openslides

Advanced configuration

During the first run, OpenSlides will create a file openslides-docerized/data/var/settings.py. You can change and add settings there. For a full list of options please see the OpenSlides settings docs. Please note that this page shows the OpenSlides-specific settings only. As OpenSlides is based on the Django framework, you should also have a look into the Django docs.

After you have changed settings, you need to re-start the container in order to make them effective!

But why? OpenSlides already comes with a dockerized version?!

The official repository comes with instructions on how to install the small version (~10 concurrent users) via Python/pip and instructions on how to install the Big Mode for hosting large conferences with docker-compose. The first one pollutes your environment, the second one is much more complex to get up and running as it isn't a simple docker-compose file but a set of build scripts you need to configure which then create a docker-compose file. This requires a deep understanding of the setup and also a fairly powerful machine to build on (8 GB of RAM recommended).

So I decided to fill the gap and to dockerize the Python/pip version. This makes for a small, self-contained installation of OpenSlides that can be used without knowledge of Python and Python environments.

Known Issues

• This is installation not configured to used via https yet!

Contribute

If you have questions or want to contribute to this repository, please create an issue on GitHub to discuss it!