Outline - a Notion-like open source app

[jdaviescoates]

Team wiki, documentation, meeting notes, playbooks, onboarding, work logs, brainstorming, & more…

https://www.getoutline.com/
https://github.com/outline/outline

I first heard about it in this post by @girish who also points out that the developer doesn't seem too keen in getting LDAP support added, but I whilst I'd love LDAP support to be included, lots of existing Cloudron apps don't have it (Discourse, etc - we need a filter in the app store to be able to easily see which other apps) and so I don't think that should be a show stopper (whilst still being a nice to have if at all possible).

[scooke]

@jdaviescoates 3 months ago I took a stab at getting this running locally. Here is a link to my steps that I shared on a reddit post. It was tricky, but I got it running. However, when I tried online, both on a VPS (from DO?) as well as Heroku I ran into an authentication problem with Slack... and it seems like several others who tried this had the same problem. I find it tricky to troubleshoot because googling "slack" and "outline" nets you all kinds of documentation for outlining slack!

[jdaviescoates]

@scooke I'm guessing lots of people might want the Slack auth to work, personally I'd not be too bothered about that as I want my users to ditch Slack in preference for Rocket.Chat or other self hosted open source solutions

[scooke]

@jdaviescoates Oh, the app is setup to require the Slack auth. Without it you can't login. So, sort of a dealbreaker if you can't get it running self-hosted. I can't find the links at the moment but there were a few people out there who banged their heads against the wall trying to get it to work with no result. I imagine the makers have made it so people will just give in and pay for the hosted version.

[jdaviescoates]

@scooke said in Outline - a Notion-like open source app:

@jdaviescoates Oh, the app is setup to require the Slack auth. Without it you can't login

That is a bit shitty

Seems it also has Google login too

But yeah, ideally wouldn't want to use either

[A Former User]

Supposedly "open source" but has no native login --- Outline is taking the Mickey!

[jdaviescoates]

@Hillside502 looks like there is movement on this front

https://github.com/outline/outline/issues/1177#issuecomment-603672773

[yusf]

Can’t we just have that LDAP PR included in a Cloudron app package and call it a day?

[girish]

I think they are integrating passport auth. If that's integrated, LDAP is easy to add.

[3246]

I notion but never liked the fact I rely on a third party service for some personal data.

+1 for Outline

[marcusquinn]

Posted some similar alternatives here for interest:

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2220/notion-like-foss-app/24?_=1594590712165

[ianhyzy]

bumping this, looks like they're very close to merging passport.js changes: https://github.com/outline/outline/pull/1183

[marcusquinn]

@ianhyzy Nice, watching this one with interest!

[marcusquinn]

Just checked, don't see any progress on this unless I'm missing something?

[yusf]

@marcusquinn The action is in develop branch.

[lucidfox]

Any updates on getting Outline on to Cloudron?

I've been playing around with a hosted version, and have to say Outline seems very intuitive and easy to use, compared with some of the alternatives (on Cloudron and otherwise).

[jdaviescoates]

@lucidfox said in Outline - a Notion-like open source app:

Any updates on getting Outline on to Cloudron?

I think at present it still only possible to login with Google and Slack.

Apparently this is the current block:
https://github.com/outline/outline/issues/1317

[lucidfox]

@jdaviescoates mmm... that's a pity. hopefully they'll add other authentication options soon.

[jdaviescoates]

@lucidfox it looks like a relevant pull request adding other authentication methods has now been merged!

https://github.com/outline/outline/pull/1934

Now we just need someone to package it for Cloudron!

[A Former User]

I'd personally love to use this so I don't mind taking a crack at it. Can't until after this weekend though so if anyone else wants to go for it... go nuts.