Introduction

Welcome to the Bonfire documentation!

What is Bonfire?

Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form communities online.

Main features

Modular architecture: Bonfire consists of extensions that shape the functionality and user experience of each digital space. Communities can enable or disable these extensions to customize their space according to their needs and vision.
Extensibility: Developers can create new extensions to expand the capabilities of digital spaces, such as adding new activities or introducing innovative user experiences for existing functions.
Federation: Bonfire allows digital spaces to connect and communicate with each other, enabling users to interact across different communities while maintaining their unique identities and preferences.
Flexibility: Whether you're an individual developer or part of a larger team, Bonfire provides a flexible framework for building and customizing digital spaces that cater to a wide range of communities and purposes.

Bonfire empowers developers and communities to create engaging, customizable, and interconnected digital spaces that foster collaboration, creativity, and social interaction online.

How to use these docs

Pre-requisite knowledge

Join our Community

Here you'll find some work-in-progress guides to get up and running with Bonfire, or to build on top of it. Please join our chat room or open an issue if you have feedback or encounter a bug.

Setup a new bonfire instance

How to deploy Bonfire on a server (currently only for beta testing)
Read the guide

Hack on Bonfire

Follow this guide to set up a development environment.
By the end of the guide, you will be able to run Bonfire locally, fork one or more extension and compile your changes.

FAQs

Find the most relevant questions about the project.

Topics

Architecture overview

Discover the inner workings of Bonfire and learn how all modules are bundled together.

Bonfire code styles

Bonfire has a few libraries that are widely used in the codebase and make writing Elixir feel a little bit different. To help you get less confused, here's a guide on what we can call "bonfire-flavoured elixir".

Circle & Boundaries

Boundaries is Bonfire's flexible framework to deal with access control. It makes it easy to ensure that users may only see or do what they are supposed to.

Database

Bonfire uses the excellent PostgreSQL database for most data storage. Discover the nitty gritty details of how we use it.

GraphQL

Bonfire leverages upon GraphQL for all the economic activities implemented. Learn how to use it to your advantage.

MRF

The Message Rewrite Facility (MRF) is a subsystem that is implemented as a series of hooks that allows the administrator to rewrite or discard messages.

Useful links

Code of Conduct

Privacy policy

Changelog

Issue tracker

Support

Get the code