System

Every Decidim is multi-tenant by default. That means that you can have multiple organizations inside a same installation. This is being used for instance for the Barcelona and Girona Provincial Governments, for offering Decidim installations to many small cities, or by the City of Barcelona, for giving service to lots of organizations (associations, federations, cooperatives, etc).

Even if you only have one organization you need to create it through the System Panel. It is available after you have installed Decidim, at /system. For instance if your domain is example.org, then it should be available at http://example.org/system.

After you have freshly installed Decidim, you are redirected to the System panel log-in page:

1. Create a system admin account

For logging in to this dashboard, you need to create a system admin account from your terminal:

bin/rails decidim_system:create_admin

You will be asked for an email and a password. For security, the password will not get displayed back at you and you need to confirm it.

2. Access the Dashboard

With the email and password that you have added in the past step, you are able to log in. After you have logged in, you should see an empty dashboard:

3. Create a new organization

Inside of the system panel, you need to create your Organization through the form:

Please mind that some of these fields cannot change through the System Form, as changing them could potentially leave your database in a broken state. You can change it through the console, but you will be on your own.

General settings

Table 1. System - New Organization form general settings
Field	Type	Description
Name	Required	Name of your organization. For instance, "Decidim Barcelona".
Reference prefix	Required	The reference prefix is used to uniquely identify resources across all organizations. For instance, "BCN". You can change how it is created through Decidim’s initializer (see Custom resource reference).
Host	Required	Fully qualified domain name. For instance, "example.org" or "decidim.barcelona".
Secondary hosts	Optional	Others domains or subdomains that point to this same installation. Normally this should not be used. Enter each one of them in a new line. For instance, "example.com".
Organization admin name	Required	Name of the admin account. For instance, "Admin"
Organization admin email	Required	Email for the admin account. For instance, "admin@example.org"
Organization locales	Required	You need to configure at least one language. Decidim is multilingual, meaning that you can have most of the admin contents with any number of languages. For seeing other languages you need to configure first the Decidim’s initializer.
Force authentication	Optional	Check if you want to Force users to authenticate before access organization. That means visitor they do not see any published content and they only have access to the log-in form.
Users registration mode	Optional	Control how you want the login / participant register or signup to work. See below.
Available authorizations	Optional	How you want to authorize and verify that your participants are who they say they are. It depends a lot on your Organization, country, etc. See Authorizations customization.

Advanced settings

Table 2. System - New Organization form advanced settings
Field	Type	Description
SMTP settings	Optional	Allows you to configure different SMTP servers for every organization in this installation. See SMTP configuration.
Omniauth settings	Optional	Allows you to configure through external OAUTH providers for every Organization in this installation. See Social providers configuration.
File upload settings	Optional	Allows you to configure the formats accepted on your instance, as well as default file sizes for file uploads
Content security policy	Optional	Allows you to configure organization based rules, but also to configure system wide policies in case your decidim instance is running in multi tenant mode. To learn more, check this CSP header documentation.

Users registration mode

Allow participants to register and login

Most of the installations use this setting. Means that everyone can register a participant account and login, without restrictions, only with an email account confirmation. You can disable that confirmation also if you want to through Decidim’s initializer, although we do not recommend doing that, as it is a measure for stopping spam accounts.

Do not allow participants to register, but allow existing participants to login

This is for when you make a manual import of participants' accounts.

Access only can be done with external accounts

In the case where you have an external provider configured (like the Omniauth settings) and you want to have accounts from only this provider.

Edit an organization

Finally, you can also Edit an organization, although some fields cannot be changed as some contents in the database depends on them.

For accessing your newly created Organization, you can do it by going to the domain or subdomain that you have configured in Host.