Misago
Development Status: 🍌 Bananas 🍌
Misago aims to be complete, featured and modern forum solution that has no fear to say ‘NO’ to common and outdated opinions about how forum software should be made and what it should do.
Screenshots
Production use
Misago implements all features considered “must have” on live internet forum:
- Your users may register accounts, set avatars, change options and edit their profiles. They have the option to reset a forgotten password.
- Sign in with Facebook, Google, Github, Steam, Blizzard.net or any other over 50 supported OAuth providers.
- Site admins may require users to confirm validity of their e-mail addresses via an activation link sent by email, or limit user account activation to administrator action. They can use custom Q&A challenge, ReCAPTCHA, Stop Forum Spam or IP’s blacklist to combat spam registrations. Plethora of settings are available to control user account behavior, like username lengths or avatar restrictions.
- Create categories together with unlimited number and depth of subcategories.
- Write messages using either GitHub-flavoured markdown, BBCode subset, or both.
- Presence features let site members know when other users are online, offline or banned. Individual users have setting to hide their activity from non-admins.
- Complete moderation toolset allowing admin-approved moderators to edit, move, hide, approve, delete or close user posted content. This also includes option to delete or block user accounts or avatars.
- Ban system allows you to ban existing users as well as forbid certain user names, e-mails or IP addresses from registering accounts.
- Permission system allowing you to control which features are available to users based on their rank, roles or category they are in.
- Post accurate read tracker that lets your users spot threads with new posts as well as let moderators spot unapproved replies and non-moderators spot approved posts.
- Private threads feature allowing users to create threads visible only to them and those they’ve invited.
- Python-based profile fields framework letting site owners to define custom fields for users to fill in complete with powerful customization options for custom requirements, display or validation logic.
- Rich polls system, allowing polls with public and private voters, single and multiple choices as well as ones that allow vote change or limit voting to a limited period of time.
- Post attachments complete thumbnailing and gif’s animation removal.
- Mark post in question thread as best answer, bringing basic Q&A functionality.
- Posts edits log allowing you to see how user messages used to look in past as well as revert function protecting you from malignant users emptying their posts contents.
- Moderation queue for users and categories allowing you to moderate content before it becomes visible to other members of the community.
- Custom theme developed with bootstrap.
- Features and settings for achieving GDPR compliance.
- Integrate forum with your site using implemented OAuth2 client and JSON API.
Even more features will follow in future releases:
- Forum-wide JS routing further reducing navigation times.
- Replacing current API with GraphQL API for easier integrations and extending.
- Plugin system to extend core package with new features.
- WYSIWYM content editor for even easier post formatting.
- Ranking system for forum search results based on post links, likes, author and thread importance.
Development
Preferred way to run Misago development instances on your machine is with Docker, which makes it easy to spin up arbitrary number of instances running different code with separate databases and dependencies besides each other.
To start, clone the repository and run ./dev init command in your terminal. This will build necessary docker containers, install python dependencies and initialize the database. After command does its magic, you will be able to start development server using the docker compose up command.
After development server starts, visit the http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser to see your Misago installation.
Admin Control Panel is available under the http://127.0.0.1:8000/admincp/ address. To log in to it use Admin username and password password.
The ./dev utility implements other features besides the init. Run it without any arguments to get the list of available actions.
Running Misago in development without dev
You may skip ./dev init and setup dev instance manually, running those commands:
docker compose build: builds docker containersdocker compose run --rm misago python manage.py migrate: runs migrationsdocker compose run --rm misago python manage.py createsuperuser: creates admin userdocker compose up: starts dev server
Frontend
With exception of Admin Panel, Misago frontend relies heavily on React.js components backed by Django API. This application uses webpack for building.
Currently Misago’s package.json defines following tasks:
npm run build: does production build of Misago’s assets, bundling and minifying JavaScript, CSS and images, as well as moving them to the misago/static/misago directory.npm run start: does quick build for assets:bundling, compiling less, deployment to misago/static/misago. Doesn’t minify/optimize. Runs re-build when less/js file changes.npm run prettier: formats code with prettier.npm run eslint: lints the code with eslint.
To start work on custom frontend for Misago, fork and install it locally to have development forum setup. You can now develop custom theme by modifying assets in frontend directory, however special care should be taken when changing source JavaScript files as no test suite for those exists.
Misago defines template that allows you to include custom html and JavaScript code before Misago’s JavaScript app is run, named scripts.html.
Admin
Admin assets are stored in misago-admin directory and deployed to misago/static/misago/admin directory on build.
To work on admin’s JavaScript or CSS, cd to misago-admin and install dependencies with npm install. Now you can use following actions:
npm run build: does production build of assets, bundling and minifying JavaScript and CSS files.npm run dev: does quick build for JavaScript and CSS assets, only bundling but not minifying. Also does a rebuild when one of the files changes.
Emails
Misago uses Mailpit to capture emails sent from the development instance.
To browse those emails, visit the http://127.0.0.1:8025 in your browser for the web interface.
Note for Windows users
If you are using Windows, you may see the following error during installation:
=> ERROR [misago 8/8] RUN ./dev bootstrap_plugins
------
> [misago 8/8] RUN ./dev bootstrap_plugins:
0.385 /bin/sh: 1: ./dev: not found
------
failed to solve: process "/bin/sh -c ./dev bootstrap_plugins" did not complete successfully: exit code: 127
This error is caused by the dev file having its line endings converted from Unix format (LF) to Windows (CRLF) by git when you cloned the repository. To fix this, disable the automatic conversion of line endings in your git configuration and then clone the repository again.
Providing feedback and contributing
If you have found a bug, please report it either on the issue tracker or on the project’s forums.
If you want to contribute to project, please see the contributing document.
For feature or support requests as well as general feedback please use the official forums. Your feedback means much to the project so please do share your thoughts!
There’s also a Discord server for those looking for instant-messaging approach for getting in touch with Misago devs and users.
Authors
Rafał Pitoń and ❤️ contributors.
Copyright and license
Misago - Copyright © 2025 Rafał Pitoń
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the conditions described in the license.
For the complete license, refer to LICENSE.rst
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