Quickstart for admins

This page is for the person who runs the Confabulous instance — provisioning the stack, configuring auth, and operating it for end users. If your team already has a Confabulous instance and you just want to use it, see the Quickstart for end users.

1. Try locally

The fastest way to see Confabulous working end-to-end is to clone the repo and run the full stack on your laptop with Docker Compose. This is purely for evaluation — it is not a production deployment.

Prerequisites: Docker and Docker Compose, plus git.

git clone https://github.com/ConfabulousDev/confab-web.git
cd confab-web
docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:8080 and log in with:

• Email: [email protected]
• Password: localdevpassword

Caution

These default credentials and the localhost binding are for evaluation only. Never expose this configuration to a network. When you’re ready for a real deployment, see Deployment walkthrough.

Try the Quickstart for end users flow against your local instance (using --backend-url http://localhost:8080) to confirm the CLI streams sessions in.

2. Deploy for real

Localhost is for prototyping; a real Confabulous instance lives on real infrastructure with HTTPS, real authentication, and a real domain.

When you’re ready, work through:

• Deployment walkthrough — the full server-side setup, from docker-compose.yml through HTTPS, auth, and upgrades.
• Sample deployments — annotated configs for Fly.io and Linode that power confabulous.dev and demo.confabulous.dev.
• Configuration reference — every environment variable.

3. Onboard your team

Once your instance is up and reachable, share its URL with your users and point them at the Quickstart for end users. They sign in, run confab setup --backend-url <your-instance-url>, and they’re done.