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🚧 Documentation is still under construction 🚧
Please send us a message in our community or email us for direct answers to questions. If there are missing pages, or broken links. Don't hesitate to let us know!
Express Installation
You can install Novel via the following commands and it will get you an almost-ready Novel instance.
You are ready 🎉
Go to http://localhost:7634 to see the default screens and API.
Set up Stripe and Postmark
Novel will run just fine without these settings, but you wont be able to create accounts and send email.
Manual Installation
If at any point the express installation does not work for you, you may refer to the installation.
This assumes you are in a unix environment: Unix / OSX / Powershell
Install Git / Homebrew / NVM
You will need to install the package and runtime managers needed by Novel
Install Homebrew
Reference: https://brew.sh
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh
Install NVM
Reference: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm#installing-and-updating
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.1/install.sh | bash
Install Git
You can follow the instruction here https://git-scm.com/downloads/mac or run
brew install git
Install node.js
Now that NVM is available, you can install the latest version of node easily
nvm install 23
If this is not available, try to close your terminal and open it again. If all else fails, copy below into the terminal
# ONLY IF NVM FAILS TO RUN
export NVM_DIR="$([ -z "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME-}" ] && printf %s "${HOME}/.nvm" || printf %s "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/nvm")"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm
Accept the Github Organization Invite
Head over to the https://github.com/madewithnovel repository and accept the Invitation.
If you do not see this, please send us a message at [email protected]
Clone the Novel codebase
Git should also be available in your machine. Before running this, make sure you have your key exchange is set up with github
You can see this manual if you havent
Once you have done this, you can now clone the repository by doing this in your terminal
mkdir [YOUR SAAS DIRECTORY]
cd [YOUR SAAS DIRECTORY]
git clone [email protected]:madewithnovel/novel.git
rm -rf web
git clone [email protected]:madewithnovel/next.js.git web
npm install
mv .env.sample .env
You should have the API and WEB codebase available to you.
Set-up your Database
Now you need to set up your database, you have 2 options: Docker or native install.
Install Docker
If you dont have docker available. Install it via this page
https://docs.docker.com/desktop/setup/install/linux/
Docker Available
If you have docker available, you can run the following command in your terminal
docker run --name novel-db \
-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres \
-e POSTGRES_USER=postgres \
-e POSTGRES_DB=novel \
-p 5433:5433 \
-d postgres:17
Add the Connection String to the Environment file `.env`
Replace the DB_HOST on line 4 of the new .env file
To the value below
DB_HOST=postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5433/novel
Next steps
You can go to our guides to start a SaaS speedrun
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