Open source software for building online communities, the platform behind DEV Community
- Stars22.7k
- Forks4.2k
- Open Issues104
AGPL-3.0
- Ruby
- JavaScript
- HTML
About Forem
Forem is open source software for building online communities, whether for peers, customers, fanbases, families, or any group that needs a shared space. It is the platform behind DEV Community (dev.to), a community of millions of software developers who write articles, take part in discussions, and build professional profiles.
Members publish articles, follow tags and people, react to and comment on posts, and grow public profiles. Feeds rank content for each reader, and an optional embeddings pipeline can power semantic recommendations once configured. Operators run their own community with the same software that hosts DEV.
Forem runs on a Ruby on Rails backend with a Preact-first frontend and a PostgreSQL database. It can be self-hosted on any cloud provider or bare-metal server, with Kamal-based Docker deploys, and is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 or later.
Key features
- Article publishing with rich discussion threads
- Reactions, comments, and tag-based content feeds
- Public professional profiles and following
- Per-reader ranked feeds with optional semantic recommendations
- Self-hostable community platform behind dev.to
Details
- License
- AGPL-3.0-or-later
- Backend
- Ruby on Rails
- Frontend
- Preact-first
- Database
- PostgreSQL · pgvector
- Powers
- DEV Community (dev.to)
- Deployment
- Cloud or bare metal via Kamal