Empty database installation

You may want to setup your Decidim installation with an empty database to take full control of all aspects of the Decidim organization. Please follow the steps below to start with an empty database:

  1. Follow steps 1 through 5 of the Manual installation tutorial.

  2. Run the migrations from the root of your project in the terminal.

bin/rails db:create db:migrate

  1. Create a system admin account to log in to the system panel with the following command and follow the instructions shown in the terminal:

      * For the sake of conformity with the rest of documentation, you can create a user with email `system@example.org` and password `decidim123456789`. Of course this is not recommended for a production environment as it is not secure.
bin/rails decidim_system:create_admin

  1. To create your organization’s admin user, start the server and configure the organization from the system panel:

bundle exec rails s

Now, you will be able to login to the system panel with the provided credentials. The application automatically redirects you to the system panel when you do not have any organizations configured and when you enter the system’s URL in your browser. The default URL for development is http://localhost:3000.

After you have configured the organization from the system panel, log out of the system panel and type in the URL of the organization to the browser after which you should see a rather empty home page of your organization. You can now login with the admin user you created when configuring the organization. Note that you will need to set a password for the admin user before being able to login with that user.

At the development environment, you have Letter opener available for viewing the emails that the system sends. You can access it through the /letter_opener URL within the domain where your Rails server is running at (typically http://localhost:3000).

Extra notes

Decidim is a multitenant application that allows you to host multiple different Decidim-based websites within the same system. Organizations are isolated from each other and users in those organizations cannot see any data from other organizations. Therefore, creating the organization is a key part of the process when setting up Decidim. To learn more about the system panel and organizations, refer to the System panel documentation.