Welcome to the Forem codebase, the platform that powers
dev.to. We are so excited to have you. With your help, we can
build out Forem’s usability, scalability, and stability to better serve our
communities.
What is Forem?
Forem is open source software for building communities. Communities for your
peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space
where people need to come together to be part of a collective.
See our announcement post
for a high-level overview of what Forem is.
dev.to (or just DEV) is hosted by Forem. It is a community of
software developers who write articles, take part in discussions, and build
their professional profiles. We value supportive and constructive dialogue in
the pursuit of great code and career growth for all members. The ecosystem spans
from beginner to advanced developers, and all are welcome to find their place
within our community. ❤️
Table of Contents
Contributing
We welcome pull requests on any issue, regardless of its current status, if it provides a fix or improvement. While we cannot guarantee that every PR will be merged, we value legitimate suggestions and contributions.
All pull requests should include appropriate tests. Our current focus is primarily on backend-related regression tests, while frontend changes may require more extensive user review.
We welcome AI-assisted pull requests but will turn away "slop" — all submissions must maintain high standards of code quality and meaningful utility.
🤖 AI Agents: Check out AGENTS.md for more instructions. Forem also synchronizes these rules across .cursorrules, .windsurfrules, and .github/copilot-instructions.md for specific IDEs and environments.
Please also check out the Contributing to Forem guide for more detailed guidelines.
Getting Started
This section provides a high-level quick start guide. If you're looking for a more thorough installation guide (for example with macOS), you'll want to refer to our complete Developer Documentation.
We run on a Rails backend, and we are currently transitioning to a Preact-first frontend.
Prerequisites Note: Forem now utilizes advanced AI embeddings for feed generation. You must ensure your PostgreSQL installation has the pgvector extension (version 0.8.0 or higher) installed to support HNSW indexing. This database extension is a hard requirement to migrate the database and run the app.
To install pgvector:
- macOS (Homebrew):
brew install pgvector
- Linux (Debian/Ubuntu):
sudo apt install postgresql-15-pgvector (adjust 15 to match your installed PostgreSQL version), or compile from source following the pgvector installation guide.
Providing a Gemini API key (GEMINI_API_KEY) to actually generate the embeddings is completely optional; if omitted, the app will continue to function normally without semantic recommendations.
A more complete overview of our stack is available in our docs.
Launching in a Cloud Dev Environment
Installation Documentation
Please see our installation guides:
Developer Documentation
Check out our dedicated docs page for more technical documentation. Please note that while the documentation is a great place to start, some parts may be out of date as the project evolves.
Deployment with Kamal (Beta)
Forem is equipped with Kamal 2 to allow you to easily deploy the application to any cloud provider or bare metal server.
For a comprehensive guide, including cloud provider setups (AWS, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, GCP), secrets management, and Forem-specific production gotchas, see the Kamal Deployment Guide.
Prerequisites
Before deploying, ensure you have:
- SSH access to your target server(s).
- Docker installed on your local machine and target server(s).
- A Docker container registry account (e.g., GitHub Container Registry, Docker Hub).
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
