A fast, collaborative, knowledge base for your team built using React and Node.js.
Try out Outline using our hosted version at www.getoutline.com.

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, A hosted version of the app is offered at getoutline.com. You can also find documentation on using Outline in our guide.

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

Installation

Please see the documentation for running your own copy of Outline in a production configuration.

If you have questions or improvements for the docs please create a thread in GitHub discussions.

Contributing

Note: Please do not submit AI-generated pull requests. We receive a high volume of mass, low-quality PRs generated by AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot from contributors who are unfamiliar with the codebase. These PRs are almost never mergeable and waste maintainer time reviewing them. If you’d like to contribute, please take the time to understand the codebase and write your changes thoughtfully.

Before submitting a pull request you must discuss with the core team by creating or commenting in an issue on GitHub – 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 and that you have read these instructions. This will result in a much higher likelihood of your 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, quality fixes, and other issues listed on GitHub

Development

There is a short guide for setting up a development environment if you wish to contribute changes, fixes, and improvements to Outline.

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. logging can be enabled for all categories by setting DEBUG=* or for specific categories such as DEBUG=database and LOG_LEVEL=debug, or LOG_LEVEL=silly for very verbose logging.

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 Vitest and add a file with .test.ts 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 with vitest:

# To run backend tests
yarn test:server

# To run a specific backend test in watch mode
yarn test path/to/file.test.ts --watch

# To run frontend tests
yarn test:app

Migrations

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

yarn db:create-migration --name my-migration
yarn db:migrate
yarn db:rollback

Or, to run migrations on test database:

yarn db:migrate --env test

Activity

License

Outline is BSL 1.1 licensed.