Outline

Outline is a collaborative knowledge base for a team, written in React and Node.js, and this repository is the source that runs the hosted product together with its supporting services. Anyone who simply wants to use it does not need the code at all, since a hosted version is offered by the maintainers.

The repository exists for two audiences: people running their own copy and people contributing changes. Production hosting is documented separately, and container images are published for both.

Running your own instance means dealing with a handful of moving parts.

• Logging: category prefixed console output in development and JSON logs in production, ready for a log ingestion pipeline.
• Debug switches: environment variables that widen output for HTTP, for the database, or for every category at once.
• Migrations: Sequelize commands to create, apply and roll back schema changes, including against the test database.
• Tests: Vitest files placed next to the code they cover, with API endpoints and anything authentication related tested thoroughly.

Contributors are asked to open or comment on an issue before writing code, so an approach is agreed first. The maintainers state plainly that AI generated pull requests are unwelcome, having received a high volume of mass produced ones that are almost never mergeable. Translation, performance work and documentation are named as good places to start instead. The project is licensed under BSL 1.1.