// the find
suitenumerique/docs
A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React.
A self-hosted collaborative document editor — think Notion or Confluence but open source and built by the French and German governments. Uses Yjs for real-time sync, BlockNote for the editor, and Django/DRF on the backend. Aimed at public sector organizations that need data sovereignty, but usable by any team that wants to run their own wiki.
The real-time collaboration stack (Yjs + HocusPocus) is production-grade, not bolted on. The document tree structure uses ltree/treebeard properly rather than naive parent-id recursion — that matters at scale. Test coverage is genuinely deep: there are dedicated test files for nearly every API surface, including edge cases like malware detection and migration correctness. Government backing means it won't be abandoned for a SaaS pivot.
The GPL licensing caveat on PDF export is a real operational gotcha — it's buried in a warning block and will surprise anyone who assumes MIT means MIT throughout. The internal project is still called 'impress' everywhere (settings, gunicorn config, ASGI entrypoint), which suggests it started as something else and the rename was shallow; expect confusing breadcrumbs when debugging. OIDC is the only supported auth path — there's no local username/password option beyond the dev default, so orgs without an identity provider have real setup friction. Elasticsearch/OpenSearch is not included; search uses pg_trgm which degrades noticeably on large document sets.