Installing Decidim

Check the formatted guide! 👉 https://platoniq.github.io/decidim-install/

A easy guide to install Decidim, which is a participatory democracy framework created in Ruby on Rails.

It’s a very interesting piece of software but it may be challenging to install it if you are not familiar with the internals.

Here I’ll make a step-by-step guide on how to install it on production into a machine with Ubuntu 18.04.

I’ve made this guide because it can be quite challenging to install Decidim in production (as there’s currently not much official documentation covering this). This guide also covers some common problems you may face during the process.

Start here:

1. Installing Decidim on Ubuntu This will guide you to the process of install Decidim in a clean machine and getting it up an running.
   
   • Installing Decidim on Ubuntu 18.04
     
   • Installing Decidim on Ubuntu 20.04
     
2. Use an automated script to install Decidim in Ubuntu 18.04
   Download a BASH script that performs automatically (almost) all the required steps to install Decidim in Ubuntu 18.04. To use only in freshly installed systems.
3. Minimal configuration of Decidim
   This part is to configure the 3 extra aspects required run Decidim appropriately. Configure Email sending, SSL security in your server and OAuth authentication.
4. Installing in Amazon AWS with ElasticBeanstalk
   An alternative guide to install Decidim in Amazon AWS. This is a Heroku-like PaaS deployment system. It auto-scales servers if needed and it may be a little cheaper than Heroku.
5. Decidim update guide
   Check this to upgrade Decidim to a new version.
6. Advanced config & tricks
   A work in progress file to document some common issues and how to solve it (feel free to ask in the issues).
7. Use Capistrano to automate your deployments
   A guide to professionalize the maintenance of your application. Capistrano allows to safely perform all the tasks related to update your application from your computer.
8. Ansible playbook for Arch Linux installation
   The repository contains an Ansible playbook to support Decidim installation with all dependencies on Arch Linux.

Feel free to create issues or pull requests if you encounter errors or want to make improvements in this guide!

Official resources

• Decidim official documentation, Happy to say that this guide is linked there!

• Decidim source code, There’s additional documentation here (dive into the docs/ folder).

• Edu Decidim Community using Decidim with resources to successfully use Decidim.

• Meta Decidim Community using Decidim to make decisions about the software itself.

Questions?

Feel free to check the issues or open a new one if you have questions or something is wrong. Pull-request are always wellcome.

Also, give me a star if you liked it!

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Credits

@Author
Ivan Vergés
Twitter @ivanverges

@Thanks to
Robert Garrigós and the rest of testers that point many improvements and fixes to this guide, Guillem Marpons and the rest of the Decidim team for their encouragement and support.

@License
AGPL 3.0