// the find
firestormforum/firestorm
An open-source forum engine, with an Elixir+Phoenix backend and an Elm frontend.
Firestorm is an MIT-licensed forum engine with an Elixir and Phoenix backend and an Elm frontend, plus separate client repos for Vue, Flutter and React Native. DailyDrip ran it as a Kickstarter project, and it is still at version 0.10, last pushed in September 2023. It suits developers who want to run their own community forum on the BEAM.
- Four separate client repos (Elm, Vue, Flutter, React Native) suggest the backend API was built to serve several frontends, which is harder to get right than a server-rendered app with one client.
- Phoenix on the BEAM is a sensible base for a forum: many concurrent readers, cheap processes, and Phoenix Channels give a natural path to live thread updates.
- The MIT license and a live instance at forum.firestormforum.org mean you can see it running before you fork it.
- The last push was 30 September 2023. Elixir, Phoenix and Elm have all moved on since then, so expect dependency upgrades before anything else.
- The README promises a 1.0 that is described as nearly ready, but nothing in the repo metadata shows it shipped, and it is unclear who is still maintaining the project.
- The README has no setup, configuration or deployment section, and the top-level tree has no docs directory. Working out how to run it means reading mix.exs and the source.
- Elm has a small ecosystem and a thin hiring pool. The Vue, Flutter and React Native clients live in separate repos that may lag behind the server.