Installation

site_manager is available on ghcr.io as a prebuilt container image for arm64 and x84/amd64. This tutorial will show you how to pull the image from ghcr.io and deploy it together with a PostgreSQL database using Docker Desktop.

1. Install Docker Desktop

Docker Desktop is available here for all major platforms.

2. Set up environment variables

Open an empty folder in an editor of your choice (this tutorial uses VSCode). Create a file called .env and paste the contents from below. In this file, you will set up basic parameters and names for the application and the database. Make sure to change at least POSTGRES_USER, POSTGRES_PASSWORD, the corresponding DATABASE_URL and BETTER_AUTH_SECRET. The rest of the parameters can be left as they are.

The POSTGRES_USERand POSTGRES_PASSWORDare used to create a user with which site_manager connects to the database. This is not the user you use to login to the web ui. You will not need to enter this anywhere else.

The BETTER_AUTH_SECRET is used for hashing and encryption. You can generate a secret here by clicking the button at the end of the first paragraph.

.env

POSTGRES_DB="site-manager-db"
POSTGRES_USER="<your username>"
POSTGRES_PASSWORD="<your password>"

DATABASE_URL="postgres://<your username>:<your password>@db:5432/site-manager-db"

PORT=5056

BETTER_AUTH_SECRET= "<superlongstring>"
#secret for Better Auth, 32 character base64 string,
#see https://www.better-auth.com/docs/installation#set-environment-variables
BETTER_AUTH_URL=http://localhost:5056 # Base URL of the app

DEFAULT_ADMIN_USER="admin"
DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD="password"
DEFAULT_ADMIN_EMAIL="admin@example.com" #this is only for login, site_manager will not send you any emails

REFETCH_INTERVAL=600000
TEMPLATE_URL="https://api.github.com/repos/jan-ldwg/site_manager_templates/zipball/main"

3. Configure compose.yaml

In the same folder, create a file called compose.yaml with the following content.

compose.yaml

services:
  server:
    image: ghcr.io/jan-ldwg/site_manager_server:latest
    container_name: site-manager-server
    environment:
      NODE_ENV: production
      DATABASE_URL: ${DATABASE_URL}
      PORT: ${PORT}
      BETTER_AUTH_SECRET: ${BETTER_AUTH_SECRET}
      BETTER_AUTH_URL: ${BETTER_AUTH_URL}
      DEFAULT_ADMIN_USER: ${DEFAULT_ADMIN_USER}
      DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD: ${DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD}
      DEFAULT_ADMIN_EMAIL: ${DEFAULT_ADMIN_EMAIL}
    ports:
      - 5056:5056
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy
    restart: unless-stopped
    tmpfs:
      - /tmp
    networks:
      - site-manager-network

  db:
    image: postgres:14.20-alpine3.23
    container_name: site-manager-db
    restart: always
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: "${POSTGRES_DB}"
      POSTGRES_USER: "${POSTGRES_USER}"
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}"

    volumes:
      - db-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

    expose:
      - 5432
    healthcheck:
      test:
        [
          "CMD",
          "pg_isready",
          "--username=${POSTGRES_USER}",
          "--dbname=${POSTGRES_DB}",
        ]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 5s
    networks:
      - site-manager-network
volumes:
  db-data:

networks:
  site-manager-network:
    name: site-manager-network
    driver: bridge

4. Run in Docker Desktop

Open a terminal in your working directory and run

Bash

docker compose up -d

Docker should automatically fetch the required images and set up an empty database.

5. Login

Go to http://localhost:5056 and login with the account you set up in your .env as DEFAULT_ADMIN_EMAIL and DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD. If you didn't change it the default is admin@example.com and password. This account has admin privileges and can be used to add additional user accounts.