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Installation

tip

Our official Cloud offering is the easiest way to start using Linkwarden and is typically more affordable than renting a VPS.

Plus, your subscription supports both the development and the continuous improvement of the app for everyone!

Alternatively, if you prefer self-hosting Linkwarden, no problem! You still have access to all the core features.

Here you can find everything you need to setup a fully fledged Linkwarden instance on your own server.

Installation​

Hardware Requirements​

Linkwarden has pretty minimal hardware requirements - it was tested on a VPS with 4gb of memory and it ran pretty smoothly, the most intense part is when you build the app, but once it's running it's relatively lightweight.

Docker 🐋​

Requirements:

  • Docker
  • Curl
  • Nano
1. Download the required files​
mkdir linkwarden && cd linkwarden
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linkwarden/linkwarden/refs/heads/main/docker-compose.yml
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linkwarden/linkwarden/refs/heads/main/.env.sample -o ".env"
2. Configure the Environment Variables​
nano .env

The required environment variables are:

NEXTAUTH_URL=http://localhost:3000/api/v1/auth
NEXTAUTH_SECRET=VERY_SENSITIVE_SECRET
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=CUSTOM_POSTGRES_PASSWORD

The only thing you MUST change here is NEXTAUTH_SECRET and POSTGRES_PASSWORD, they both should be different secret phrases.

The NEXTAUTH_URL should be changed to your domain name only if you are hosting it somewhere else.

3. Run it!​

In the main folder (where you created the .env file) simply run the following:

docker compose up

After a few minutes (depending on your internet connection) you can access Linkwarden via http://localhost:3000 (or whichever hostname you deployed Linkwarden on).

Enjoy!

Manual Installation​

note

The Manual Installation is targeted towards a more technical audience, to take an easier path, go for installation using Docker.

Requirements:

  • Git
  • Node.js
  • Yarn
  • Postgres
  • Nano
  • Monolith

1. Clone the Linkwarden repository​

git clone https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden.git
cd linkwarden

2. Install the necessary dependancies​

yarn
npx playwright install --with-deps chromium

3. Configure the Environment Variables​

cd linkwarden
cp .env.sample .env
nano .env

The required environment variables are:

NEXTAUTH_SECRET=VERY_SENSITIVE_SECRET
NEXTAUTH_URL=http://localhost:3000/api/v1/auth
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://[USERNAME]:[PASSWORD]@localhost:[PORT]/[DATABASE]

The only thing you MUST change here is NEXTAUTH_SECRET and DATABASE_URL.

The NEXTAUTH_URL should be changed to your domain name only if you are hosting it somewhere else.

4. Build and setup the database:​

yarn build
yarn prisma migrate deploy

5. Start the app:​

yarn start

Troubleshooting​

There are a few common issues that you might encounter when setting up Linkwarden, here are some of them:

[0] upstream image response failed for https://t2.gstatic.com/faviconV2...

This error is caused by the favicon (the website's logo) not being found, it's really not a big deal, but if you want to fix it, you can set an icon to the links that don't have a favicon, or you can just hide the icons. The favicon is the only part that isn't actually stored and is being fetched from the internet every time you load the page.

Type error: Module '"@prisma/client"' has no exported member...

This error is caused by the @prisma/client package not being installed correctly, to fix it, simply run:

yarn prisma generate