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Superdesk

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About Superdesk

End-to-end news creation, production, curation, distribution, and publishing platform.

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Web Self-hosted Docker

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README.md

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Superdesk

Test Lint

Superdesk is an open source end-to-end news creation, production, curation, distribution and publishing platform developed and maintained by Sourcefabric with the sole purpose of making the best possible software for journalism. It is scaleable to suit news organizations of any size. See the Superdesk website for more information.

Looking to stay up to date on the latest news? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

The Superdesk server provides the API to process all client requests. The client provides the user interface. Server and client are separate applications using different technologies.

Find more information about the client configuration in the README file of the repo: github.com/superdesk/superdesk-client-core

Run Superdesk locally using Docker

You can start superdesk using the docker-compose.yml file:

$ docker compose up -d

This will start superdesk on http://localhost:8080. On the first run you also have to initialize elastic/mongo and create a user:

# Initialize data
$ docker compose exec superdesk-server python manage.py app:initialize_data
# Create first admin user
$ docker compose exec superdesk-server python manage.py users:create -u admin -p admin -e admin@localhost --admin

Then you can login with admin:admin credentials.

The Docker images are hosted on Dockerhub for the client and server.

Local development (frontend / extension work)

For editing the client or extensions and seeing changes immediately, use the server-in-Docker / client-native workflow described in DEVSETUP.md.

Prerequisites

  • Docker Desktop installed and running.
  • Volta installed (Node version is pinned through it).
  • Sibling repos cloned in the same parent directory as this one: superdesk-client-core and superdesk-planning are required; superdesk-analytics and superdesk-publisher are optional.

See DEVSETUP.md#prerequisites for the full layout diagram and rationale.

Running it

Once the prerequisites are in place:

  1. Run the setup script.
  2. Open http://localhost:9000 and log in with admin / admin.

There are two ways to drive step 1.

Option 1 — let Claude Code do it (recommended for new contributors)

If you have Claude Code installed, the project ships four slash commands that wrap the dev scripts. Open Claude inside this repo and type:

  • /superdesk-setup — first-time install + link siblings + init DB
  • /superdesk-up — start the stack day-to-day
  • /superdesk-down — stop the stack (data preserved)
  • /superdesk-ext list | enable NAME | disable NAME — toggle in-tree extensions

These are explicit and fast — typing one runs the corresponding script directly. Use them once you know what you want.

If you don't remember the command name, the superdesk-dev skill catches plain-language phrasings ("set up the dev environment", "start Superdesk", "enable helloWorld"…). It confirms intent with you before running anything, so the worst case of a misfire is one extra question, not an unwanted setup.

The project ships a .claude/settings.json that pre-approves the dev scripts, so you won't be asked to approve each Bash command one by one.

Option 2 — run the scripts directly

./scripts/dev/setup.sh    # first time
./scripts/dev/up.sh       # daily
./scripts/dev/down.sh     # stop

See DEVSETUP.md for the first-run validation checklist, flags (--only, --skip, --link, --reinit), extension toggling, and troubleshooting.

Manual installation

Requirements

These services must be installed, configured and running:

  • MongoDB
  • ElasticSearch (7+)
  • Redis
  • Python (3.10)
  • Node.js (with npm)

On macOS, if you have homebrew installed, simply run: brew install mongodb elasticsearch redis python3 node.

Installation steps:

path=~/superdesk
git clone https://github.com/superdesk/superdesk.git $path

# server
cd $path/server
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 manage.py app:initialize_data
python3 manage.py users:create -u admin -p admin -e '[email protected]' --admin
honcho start
# if you need some data
python manage.py app:prepopulate

# client
cd $path/client
npm install
npm run build
npx grunt server

# open http://localhost:9000 in browser

:warning: macOS users

All the above commands need to run inside the Python Virtual Environment, which you can create using the pyvenv command:

  • Run pyvenv ~/pyvenv to create the files needed to start an environment in the directory ~/pyvenv.
  • Run . ~/pyvenv/bin/activate to start the virtual environment in the current terminal session.

Now you may run the installation steps from above.

Questions and issues

  • Our issue tracker is only for bug reports and feature requests.
  • Anything else, such as questions or general feedback, should be posted in the forum.

A special thanks to...

Users, developers and development partners that have contributed to the Superdesk project. Also, to all the other amazing open-source projects that make Superdesk possible!

License

Superdesk is available under the AGPL version 3 open source license.