OpenSlides is a free, web based presentation and assembly system for managing and projecting agenda, motions and elections of an assembly. See https://openslides.org/ for more information.

The OpenSlides server runs everywhere where Python is running (for example on GNU/Linux, Mac or Windows). For the OpenSlides client a current webbrowser is required.

Make sure that you have installed Python (>= 3.6) on your system.

Additional you need build-essential packages, header files and a static library for Python and also the pyvenv-3 binary package for python3.

E.g. run on Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential python3-dev python3-venv

You can setup a virtual Python environment using the virtual environment (venv) package for Python to install OpenSlides as non-root user.

Create your OpenSlides directory and change to it:

$ mkdir OpenSlides
$ cd OpenSlides

Setup and activate the virtual environment:

$ python3 -m venv .virtualenv
$ source .virtualenv/bin/activate
$ pip install --upgrade setuptools pip

To install OpenSlides just run:

$ pip install openslides

This installs the latest stable version. To install a specific (beta) version use openslides==x.y.

You can also use the package from the OpenSlides website. Download latest OpenSlides release as compressed tar archive and run:

$ pip install openslides-x.y.tar.gz

This will install all required Python packages (see requirements/production.txt).

To start OpenSlides simply run:

$ openslides

If you run this command the first time, a new database and the admin account (Username: admin, Password: admin) will be created. Please change the password after first login!

OpenSlides will start a webserver. It will also try to open the webinterface in your default webbrowser. The server will try to listen on the local ip address on port 8000. That means that the server will be available to everyone on your local network (at least for commonly used network configurations).

If you use a virtual environment (see step b.), do not forget to activate the environment before restart after you closed the terminal:

$ source .virtualenv/bin/activate

To get help on the command line options run:

$ openslides --help

You can store settings, database and other personal files in a local subdirectory and use these files e. g. if you want to run multiple instances of OpenSlides:

$ openslides start --local-installation

Download the latest portable version of OpenSlides for Windows from OpenSlides website which does not require any install steps. Simply unzip the downloaded file and run openslides.exe.

You can either pull the image openslides/openslides or build it yourself (via docker build -t openslides/openslides .). You have all prequistes installed it to start a quick server. To see how it should be used to setup an production environment, see openslides-docker.

You can start a quick-setup (not for production purposes, only local testing) with:

$ docker run -v /path/to/save/something:/app/personal_data -p 4200:4200 openslides/openslides /bin/bash -c "python manage.py createsettings && python manage.py migrate && (python manage.py runserver & (cd client && npm start))"

If you want to contribute to OpenSlides, have a look at OpenSlides website and write us an email. There is also an instruction to install the development version.

The installation steps described above install OpenSlides in a way that does NOT support hundreds of concurrent clients. To install OpenSlides for big assemblies some variables have to be changed in the OpenSlides settings file (usually called settings.py).

The configuration values that have to be altered are:

• CHANNEL_LAYERS
• DATABASES
• SESSION_ENGINE
• REDIS_ADDRESS

You should use a webserver like Apache HTTP Server or nginx to serve the static and media files as proxy server in front of your OpenSlides interface server. You also should use a database like PostgreSQL and Redis as channels backend, cache backend and session engine. Finally you should use gunicorn with uvicorn as interface server.

Please see the respective section in the DEVELOPMENT.rst and:

• https://channels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/deploying.html
• https://github.com/sebleier/django-redis-cache
• https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/ref/settings/#databases

OpenSlides uses the following projects or parts of them:

• Several Python packages (see requirements/production.txt and requirements/big_mode.txt).
• Several JavaScript packages (see client/package.json)

OpenSlides is Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), and distributed under the MIT License, see LICENSE file. The authors of OpenSlides are mentioned in the AUTHORS file.