Complete Docmost Deployment: The Self-Hosted Wiki That Replaces Confluence

Confluence charges per user per month. Notion charges per workspace. If your team is large enough, the bills add up fast. Docmost is an open-source wiki that does most of what both platforms do, runs on your own VPS, and costs you the price of your server.

It has real-time collaborative editing, page permissions, spaces for different teams, comments, page history, file attachments, Draw.io and Excalidraw diagrams, and Mermaid flowcharts. It also has a built-in AI assistant that connects to Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible API so your documentation stays private. It has 3 million downloads and 20,000 GitHub stars.

What you need

Docker and Docker Compose are the only requirements. Docmost ships as three containers — the application itself, PostgreSQL for data, and Redis for session management. You need about 2GB of RAM minimum and a domain or subdomain pointed at your server.

Deploy with Docker Compose

Create a directory and download the compose file:

mkdir docmost && cd docmost
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docmost/docmost/main/docker-compose.yml

Open the file and update the required values. You must change three things:

• APP_URL — your domain, for example https://docmost.example.com
• APP_SECRET — a long random string. Generate one with openssl rand -hex 32
• POSTGRES_PASSWORD — a strong database password. Update it in both the environment block and the DATABASE_URL

The working compose file looks like this:

services:
  docmost:
    image: docmost/docmost:latest
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
    environment:
      APP_URL: "https://docmost.example.com"
      APP_SECRET: "YOUR_SECRET_HERE"
      DATABASE_URL: "postgresql://docmost:PASSWORD@db:5432/docmost"
      REDIS_URL: "redis://redis:6379"
    ports:
      - "3002:3000"
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - docmost:/app/data/storage

  db:
    image: postgres:18
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: docmost
      POSTGRES_USER: docmost
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: YOUR_DB_PASSWORD
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/postgresql

  redis:
    image: redis:8
    command: ["redis-server", "--appendonly", "yes", "--maxmemory-policy", "noeviction"]
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - redis_data:/data

volumes:
  docmost:
  db_data:
  redis_data:

Start the stack:

docker compose up -d

If port 3000 is already in use on your server, change 3000:3000 to 3002:3000 in the ports section and update the Nginx proxy_pass to match.

Configure Nginx as a reverse proxy with SSL and WebSocket support

Docmost needs to run behind a reverse proxy. It requires WebSockets for the real-time collaborative editor, so Nginx must be configured to forward the Upgrade and Connection headers. Without this, the editor falls back to read-only mode.

Install Certbot if you do not have it:

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx -y

Create the Nginx site config:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/docmost

Put this in the file:

server {
    server_name docmost.example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3002;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

        # WebSocket support -- required for real-time collaborative editing
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

        proxy_read_timeout 86400;
    }

    listen 80;
}

Enable the site and get an SSL certificate:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/docmost /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t
sudo certbot --nginx -d docmost.example.com

Reload Nginx:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Verify the installation

Open your domain in a browser. You should see the Docmost setup page where you create your workspace and first admin account. If you see a blank page or a 502 error, the containers may not be ready yet — wait 30 seconds and try again.

Check the health endpoint:

curl https://docmost.example.com/api/health

A healthy response returns a JSON object with a status field.

Check the container logs if something is wrong:

docker compose logs docmost
docker compose logs db

What to do after setup

You become the workspace owner automatically. From there, you can create spaces, invite members, set permissions per space or page, and start writing. The editor supports slash commands, mentions, page links, and inline diagrams.

If you are migrating from Confluence, Docmost has an import tool for Confluence Spaces and Notion exports. The HTML and Markdown import options are also available if you are moving from older systems.