Collaboration
DesignFlow works entirely offline against a local folder. Connecting the app to a collab server adds accounts, shared projects, and live co-editing on top of that.
What the server provides today
- Accounts and organisations. Email and password sign-in, organisations, teams, project membership, and four roles from owner down to commenter.
- Shared projects. A synced data plane keeps every connected client on the same document, with conflicts resolved per field rather than by a dialog.
- Presence. Avatars in the top bar, coloured cursors and selection outlines on the canvas, and click-to-follow to jump to what someone else is looking at.
- Co-editing. Design mode and UX mode edit concurrently. Remote drags show as ghosts, a remotely changed property flashes in the right panel, and undo stays per-user.
- Comments. Threads pinned to canvas elements, with resolve and reopen.
Reviews, notifications, the activity feed, and the enterprise features (SSO, audit log export, seat management) are specified but not shipped.
Point the app at a server
The server URL is a per-machine setting, stored outside any project.
- Open the account menu in the top bar.
- Choose App settings…
-
Put the API address in Collab server URL — for a hosted server that is
https://api.<domain>, with no trailing path. - Choose Save, then Restart now.
The URL must use https. Plain http is accepted only for the
loopback hosts (localhost, 127.0.0.1, [::1]), so a
development server on your own machine still works. Clear removes the
override and returns the app to its built-in default.
Sign in
Sign-in is email and password. Create an account from the app once the server URL is set; the account lives on that server, so an account on one server is unknown to another. If you were invited to an organisation or a project, use the email address the invitation was sent to.
Self-hosting
The server is one Docker Compose stack: Caddy for TLS and routing, the collab server itself, and Postgres. It fits comfortably on a small VPS. Nothing is built on the host — the image is published by CI and the host only pulls it.
The operator runbook lives at deploy/README.md in the source repository and
covers host preparation, DNS, first deploy, verification, nightly backups to object storage,
and restore. The source repository is private today, so the runbook is
available on request — ask through the
releases repository.
Next
- Getting started — install and project layout.
- MCP setup — connect an IDE assistant to the project.