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La Suite Docs: Collaborative Text Editing

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

Docs is an open-source collaborative editor that helps teams write, organize, and share knowledge together - in real time.

What is Docs?

Docs is an open-source alternative to tools like Notion or Google Docs, focused on:

Real-time collaboration
Clean, structured documents
Knowledge organization
Data ownership & self-hosting

Built for public organizations, companies, and open communities.

Why use Docs?

Writing

Rich-text & Markdown editing
Slash commands & block system
Beautiful formatting
Offline editing
Optional AI writing helpers (rewrite, summarize, translate, fix typos)

Collaboration

Live cursors & presence
Comments & sharing
Granular access control

Knowledge management

Subpages & hierarchy
Searchable content

Export/Import & interoperability

Import to .docx and .md
Export to .docx, .odt, .pdf

Try Docs

Experience Docs instantly - no installation required.

🔗 Open a live demo document
🌍 Browse public instances

Self-hosting

Docs supports Kubernetes, Docker Compose, and community-provided methods such as Nix and YunoHost.

Get started with self-hosting: Installation guide

[!WARNING] Some advanced features (for example: Export as PDF) rely on XL packages from Blocknote. These packages are licensed under GPL and are not MIT-compatible

You can run Docs without these packages by building with:
bash
PUBLISH_AS_MIT=true
This builds an image of Docs without non-MIT features.

More details can be found in environment variables

Local Development (for contributors)

Run Docs locally for development and testing.

[!WARNING] This setup is intended for development and testing only. It uses Minio as an S3-compatible storage backend, but any S3-compatible service can be used.

Prerequisites

Docker
Docker Compose
GNU Make

Verify installation:

bash

docker -v
docker compose version

If you encounter permission errors, you may need to use sudo, or add your user to the docker group.

Bootstrap the project

The easiest way to start is using GNU Make:

bash

make bootstrap FLUSH_ARGS='--no-input'

This builds the app-dev and frontend-dev containers, installs dependencies, runs database migrations, and compiles translations.

It is recommended to run this command after pulling new code.

Start services:

bash

make run

Open https://localhost:3000

Default credentials (development only):

username: impress
password: impress

Frontend development mode

For frontend work, running outside Docker is often more convenient:

bash

make frontend-development-install
make run-frontend-development

Backend only

Starting all services except the frontend container:

bash

make run-backend

Tests & Linting

bash

make frontend-test
make frontend-lint

Backend tests can be run without docker. This is useful to configure PyCharm or VSCode to do it. Removing docker for testing requires to overwrite some URL and port values that are different in and out of Docker. env.d/development/common contains all variables, some of them having to be overwritten by those in env.d/development/common.test.

Demo content

Create a basic demo site:

bash

make demo

More Make targets

To check all available Make rules:

bash

make help

Django admin

Create a superuser:

bash

make superuser

Admin UI: http://localhost:8071/admin

Contributing

This project is community-driven and PRs are welcome.

Roadmap

Curious where Docs is headed?

Explore upcoming features, priorities and long-term direction on our public roadmap.

License 📝

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

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

Credits ❤️

Stack

Docs is built on top of Django Rest Framework, Next.js, ProseMirror, 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 initiative led by the French 🇫🇷 (DINUM) Government and German 🇩🇪 government (ZenDiS).

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