Outline
A polished, real-time collaborative wiki and knowledge base for teams, built with Markdown, nested documents, and deep search.
1Requirements
Outline needs PostgreSQL 14+, Redis 4+, a dedicated domain, and at least one external authentication provider (Google, Slack, GitLab, Discord, OIDC, etc.) — it has no built-in email/password login.
Outline's own docs describe it as "engineered as a horizontally scalable cloud platform" that requires dev-ops experience to self-host in production.
2Get the source and configuration template
git clone https://github.com/outline/outline.gitcd outlinecp .env.sample docker.env3Configure required environment variables
At minimum, set URL, DATABASE_URL, REDIS_URL, and SECRET_KEY in docker.env, plus the credentials for whichever auth provider you choose.
4Build and start with Docker Compose
docker compose up -dThe app listens on port 3000 by default — put it behind a reverse proxy with TLS for real use.
5First login
Sign in through your configured authentication provider; the first user to sign in becomes the workspace administrator.