zcag/tela

 
 
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tela is a self-hostable, markdown-native team wiki built for a world where agents are first-class authors and readers. It pairs a Go + PostgreSQL backend with a React 19 / Milkdown editor, live Yjs collaboration, ranked full-text and semantic search, and a built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server — so the same knowledge base your team edits in the browser is one your agents can search, read, and write directly. Atlas, its documentation engine, turns the artifacts you already produce into maintained wiki pages. Your content stays canonical markdown forever — pages.body is markdown, there is no proprietary block store.
> **👉 Start at telawiki.com** — the marketing site walks through what tela does (with pricing, a comparison, and the agent/MCP story), and the hosted instance has a free tier: no install, no card.
Why tela
- **Atlas auto-doc-gen** — point Atlas at your sources and it drafts and maintains real wiki pages, so docs track what you ship instead of rotting.
- **Built-in MCP server** — /api/mcp is part of the backend, not a bolt-on. Claude, Cursor, and other agents search, read, and author pages with scoped, per-tool write permissions.
- **Semantic + full-text search** — ranked PostgreSQL FTS works out of the box; add an embedder for pgvector-backed semantic retrieval and grounded "ask your docs" answers.
- **Live collaboration** — real-time multi-cursor editing over Yjs in a Milkdown editor, with comments, backlinks, and revision history.
- **Teams that run themselves** — users create orgs and invite teammates by email, no admin ticket. Flip a space to public and it becomes a login-free blog surface with per-author home pages.
- **Self-host & own your markdown** — pages.body is canonical markdown forever (no block table). Sync over WebDAV, export to zip/PDF, and run the whole stack with one make up.
Quickstart
You need **Docker** (with Compose) and **make**. The bundled stack builds every image via Compose, so no host Node or Go toolchain is required.
The stack comes up behind Caddy on **http://localhost:8780**. On first boot tela runs its embedded migrations automatically and lands you on the /setup wizard to create the first admin — unless you set TELA_ADMIN_PASSWORD in deploy/.env, which bootstraps the admin non-interactively.
One-click cloud deploy
Prefer managed hosting over running Compose? Deploy the published multi-arch images straight to a platform:
 
> After the first deploy, enable pgvector on the managed database once — CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS vector; — then point the backend's TELA_PUBLIC_BASE_URL at your app's public URL. Or skip ops entirely with the free cloud tier.
Common targets:
make up is the same thing as running Compose directly — under the hood it's docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.yml up -d --build (plus a forced proxy recreate so a changed Caddyfile re-mounts). The three load-bearing secrets must be set and **stable** across deploys: rotating TELA_SHARE_SECRET invalidates outstanding share cookies, and rotating TELA_API_KEY_SECRET invalidates every existing personal access token (PAT).
For full setup, TLS, backups, and upgrades see docs/self-hosting.md and the operations runbook docs/operations.md.
Local development
If :8080 is taken on your box, run make dev DEV_BE_PORT=18080 so the backend and the vite /api proxy stay consistent.
Optional: semantic search out of the box
The bundled Compose stack ships an optional Ollama embedder behind a profile. Full-text search always works; this only lights up the semantic half:
Configuration
All configuration is environment-driven via deploy/.env (copy from deploy/.env.example). In the bundled Compose stack TELA_DATABASE_URL is auto-constructed from the TELA_PG_* vars — you only set it explicitly when running the backend against an external Postgres.
Required
| Variable | Description |
| --- | --- |
| TELA_PUBLIC_BASE_URL | Public origin of the instance (e.g. https://wiki.example.com). Used in emails, share links, and OAuth audiences. |
| TELA_SHARE_SECRET | Secret signing share-link password cookies. Generate with openssl rand -hex 32; never rotate (invalidates outstanding share cookies). |