---
title: Talk Quickstart
permalink: /installation-quickstart/
---

Online comments are broken. Our open-source Talk tool rethinks how moderation,
comment display, and conversation function, creating the opportunity for safer,
smarter discussions around your work.

More than 60 newsrooms use Talk to run their on-site communities, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and IGN.

[Read more about our product features and
goals here](https://coralproject.net/).

<div class="callout">
  We offer hosting and support packages for Talk. [Contact us for more information.](https://coralproject.net/pricing/)
</div>

The documentation available here is pertaining to the technical details for
installing, configuring, and deploying Talk.

Talk is a [Node](https://nodejs.org/) application with
dependencies managed by
[Yarn](https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install) that connects to
[MongoDB](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/installation/) and
[Redis](https://redis.io/topics/quickstart) databases in order
to persist data. The following versions are supported:

- Node 8+
- Yarn 1.3.2+
- MongoDB 3.2+
- Redis 3.2.5+

You can run Talk (and its dependencies) locally or from [Docker](https://www.docker.com/community-edition#/download) containers. Docker is used in the local example below for the database and cache, however it is possible to run Talk without Docker by configuring your own MongoDB and Redis instances. We have tested Talk
and this documentation with Docker versions 17.06.2+.

An optional dependency for Talk is
[Docker Compose](https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/). It
can be used to setup your environment easily for testing. We have tested Talk
and this documentation with versions 1.14.0+.

## Installation

### Installation from Docker

To use Talk without major customization you can run the application using our
provided docker image.

Start by making a new directory and create a file called `docker-compose.yml` and copy the following:

```yml
# For details on the syntax of docker-compose.yml files, check out:
# https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v2/

version: "2"
services:
  talk:
    image: coralproject/talk:4
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    depends_on:
      - mongo
      - redis
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=development # remove this line in production
      - TALK_MONGO_URL=mongodb://mongo/talk
      - TALK_REDIS_URL=redis://redis
      - TALK_ROOT_URL=http://127.0.0.1:3000
      - TALK_PORT=3000
      - TALK_JWT_SECRET=password
  mongo:
    image: mongo:latest
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - mongo:/data/db
  redis:
    image: redis:latest
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - redis:/data
volumes:
  mongo:
    external: false
  redis:
    external: false
```

The environment variables listed above are the bare minimum needed to run the demo, for more configuration
variables, check out the [Configuration](/talk/configuration/) section.

And you can then start it with:

```bash
docker-compose up -d
```

This process will take a minute or two, it has to download docker images for the
required databases and Talk as well as setup the environments.

Now that you've started the services started using compose, you should see
output that resembles the following:

```
Creating mongo_1 ...
Creating redis_1 ...
Creating mongo_1 ... done
Creating redis_1 ... done
Creating talk_1 ...
Creating talk_1 ... done
```

Once everything has completed, run `docker-compose ps`, and you should see something like:

```
    Name                   Command               State           Ports
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
mongo_1   docker-entrypoint.sh mongod      Up      27017/tcp
redis_1   docker-entrypoint.sh redis ...   Up      6379/tcp
talk_1    yarn start                       Up      0.0.0.0:3000->3000/tcp
```

You now have a Talk instance up and running! Continue on to the [Setup](#setup) section for details on how to complete the
initial setup and get started using Talk.

### Installation from Source

To install Talk from Source, ensure that you have the version of Node as
specified above. First we will download and extract the latest codebase of Talk:

```bash
curl -sLo talk.tar.gz https://github.com/coralproject/talk/archive/master.tar.gz
mkdir -p talk
tar xzf talk.tar.gz -C talk --strip-components 1
cd talk
```

From here we need to fetch the dependencies and build the static assets using
Yarn:

```bash
yarn
yarn build
```

You can either setup the required databases by visiting the docs for [MongoDB](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/installation/) and
[Redis](https://redis.io/topics/quickstart), or using the following commands which will leverage Docker:

```bash
docker run -p 127.0.0.1:6379:6379 -d redis
docker run -p 127.0.0.1:27017:27017 -d mongo
```

Didn't work? Sometimes you may already have a container running on these ports,
run `docker ps` to see what other containers you have running and running
`docker stop <id>` on those containers to stop them.

_This documentation assumes that you will be running MongoDB on
`127.0.0.1:27017` and Redis on `127.0.0.1:6379`. The above Docker commands bind
MongoDB and Redis on these interfaces for you._

We should then specify the configuration variables that can be used to run the
application locally in a file named `.env`. This will be read by the application
when running in development mode:

```bash
NODE_ENV=development
TALK_MONGO_URL=mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/talk
TALK_REDIS_URL=redis://127.0.0.1:6379
TALK_ROOT_URL=http://127.0.0.1:3000
TALK_PORT=3000
TALK_JWT_SECRET=password
```

This is only the bare minimum needed to run the demo, for more configuration
variables, check out the [Configuration](/talk/configuration/) section.

You can now start the application by running:

```bash
yarn watch:server
```

Continue onto the [Setup](#setup) section for details on how to complete the
installation and get started using Talk.

## Setup

### Create Admin Account

With Talk running, you can now navigate to
[http://127.0.0.1:3000/admin/install](http://127.0.0.1:3000/admin/install)
and walk through the initial setup steps.

- First, enter your **Organization Name** and **Organization Contact Email**. This will appear in emails when inviting new team members.
- Next, create your Admin user. You can specify an **Email Address**, **Username**, and **Password**

- Finally, enter your list of **Permitted Domains**, read [here](/talk/configuring-talk/#permitted-domains) about whitelisting domains

_During development, ensure you whitelist 127.0.0.1:3000 otherwise the
[http://127.0.0.1:3000/](http://127.0.0.1:3000/) page will not
load._

Once the setup wizard has been completed you can log into Talk ([http://127.0.0.1:3000/](http://127.0.0.1:3000/)) using the email address and password for the Admin user account that you just created.

From here you can test out features in Talk, see comments in the admin interface where you can do moderation, and configure the user experience.
In the next step you'll create some user comments to moderate.

### Demo Embedded Comments

If you've followed the documentation above, you'll now have a running copy of
Talk. To demonstrate what your own self-hosted copy of Talk can do, we created the demo below
that can be used to test the copy that is running now on your
machine.

In order for the demo to work, you must add
`https://docs.coralproject.net/` to your
permitted domains list. You can do this by visiting
[http://127.0.0.1:3000/admin/configure](http://127.0.0.1:3000/admin/configure)
now and selecting _Tech Settings_ from the sidebar.

Once you have added the domain of these docs, you can click the button below.

<div class="demo">
  <button id="talk-demo-embed-button" type="button" class="btn btn-block btn-coral">Start Demo</button>
  <div class="alert" role="alert"></div>
  <div class="mount"></div>
</div>

### Developer Endpoints

With your local instance of Talk running in development mode (env variable `NODE_ENV=development`) you should now also be able to access the following developer routes:

- [http://127.0.0.1:3000/dev](http://127.0.0.1:3000/dev]) provides a sample comment stream

- [http://127.0.0.1:3000/dev/assets](http://127.0.0.1:3000/dev/assets]) provides a list of all stories in Talk and can generate new sample assets

### Conclusion

At this point you've successfully installed, configured, and ran your very own
instance of Talk! Continue through this documentation on this site to learn more
on how to configure, develop with, and contribute to Talk!
