Installation

July 6, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Xibo - Digital Signage

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About Xibo

Xibo is a powerful Open Source Digital Signage platform with a web content management system and Windows display player software. We have commercial player options for Android, LG webOS and Samsung Tizen, as well as CMS hosting and support.

See https://xibosignage.com for more information.

Our first open source release 1.0.0-rc1 landed in 2009, and we're committed to keeping everything you need to run a digital signage network, or single screen, open source and free to use.

Licence

Licence

Copyright (C) 2006-2026 Xibo Signage Ltd and Contributors.

Xibo is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version.

Xibo is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with Xibo. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Installation

We recommend installing an official release via Docker. Instructions for doing so can be found in our documentation.

For self-hosted manual installations without Docker, see MANUAL_INSTALL.md. Manual installations are community-supported only and not covered by the official administration manual.

Developing

Please only install a Development environment if you intend make code changes to Xibo. Installing from the repository is not suitable for a production installation.

Xibo uses Docker to ensure all contributors have a repeatable development environment which is easy to get up and running. The very same Docker containers are used in our recommended end user installation to promote consistency from development to deployment.

To these ends this repository includes a docker-compose.yml file to spin up a model development environment.

Prerequisites

The development Docker containers do not automatically build vendor files for PHP or JS, this is left as a developer responsibility. Therefore you will need the following tools:

  • Git
  • Composer
  • NodeJS version 12
  • npm
  • Docker

Clone the repository

Create a folder in your development workspace and clone the repository. If you intend to make changes and submit pull requests please Fork us first and create a new branch.

git clone git@github.com:<your_id>/xibo-cms.git xibo-cms

Branches

We maintain the following branches. To contribute to Xibo please use the develop branch as your base.

  • develop: Bug fixes for 4.4.x
  • master: Currently 4.4
  • release43: Bug fixes for 4.3
  • release42: Bug fixes for 4.2
  • release33: Bug fixes for 3.3
  • release23: Archive of 2.3
  • release18: Archive of 1.8
  • release17: Archive of 1.7
  • release1.6.4: Archive of 1.6

Install dependencies

Change into your new folder

cd xibo-cms

We recommend installing the dependencies via Docker, so that you are guarenteed consistent dependencies across different development machines.

PHP dependencies

docker run --interactive --tty --volume $PWD:/app --volume ~/.composer:/tmp composer install

This command also mounts the Composer /tmp folder into your home directory so that you can take advantage of Composer caching.

Website dependencies (webpack)

If you have installed node locally:

npm install webpack -g
npm install
npm run build

Alternatively you can use a Docker container:

docker run -it --volume $PWD:/app --volume ~/.npm:/root/.npm -w /app node:22 sh -c "npm install webpack -g; npm install; npm run build;"

Mapped Volumes

The development version of Xibo expects the code base to be mapped into the container such that changes on the host are reflected in the container.

However, the container itself creates some files, such as the twig cache and library uploads. These locations will need to be created and the container given access to them.

The easiest way to do this is to make the cache and library folders and chmod 777 them. Obviously this is not suitable for production, but you shouldn't be using these files for production (we have containers for that).

API Keys

The API requires a pub/private RSA keypair and an encryption key to be provided. The docker entrypoint will create these in /library/certs.

You can override the generated keys paths and encryption key by providing an alternative in settings-custom.php. For example:

$apiKeyPaths = [
    'publicKeyPath' => '/var/www/cms/custom/public.key',
    'privateKeyPath' => '/var/www/cms/custom/private.key',
    'encryptionKey' => ''
];

OpenOOH specification

Xibo can present the OpenOOH venue classifications in the display edit form. For this functionality to work in development, it is necessary to download the latest file and place it in here: openooh/specification.json

The production/CI containers add this file during the build process so that it is already available in the Docker image.

Bring up the Containers

Use Docker Compose to bring up the containers.

docker-compose up --build -d

Login

After the containers have come up you should be able to login with the details:

U: xibo_admin P: password

Translations

To parse the translations:

React:

cd frontend
npx i18next-cli extract

Then:

docker-compose exec web sh -c "cd /var/www/cms; rm -R ./cache"
docker-compose exec web sh -c "cd /var/www/cms; php bin/locale.php"

find ./locale ./cache ./lib ./web  -iname "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext --from-code=UTF-8 -k_e -k_x -k__ -o locale/default.pot

To import translations:

bzr pull lp:~dangarner/xibo/holmes-translations

Convert to mo format:

for i in *.po; do msgfmt "$i" -o $(echo $i | sed s/po/mo/); done

Move the resulting mo files into your locale folder.

The React language packs (frontend/public/locale/langs/*.json) are generated from the locale/*.mo files and are not committed, they are build artifacts. npm run dev and npm run build regenerate them automatically, so you normally don't need to do anything. To regenerate them manually (e.g. after adding new mo files):

cd frontend
npm run i18n:convert

Swagger API Docs

To generate a swagger.json file, with the dev containers running:

docker-compose exec web sh -c "cd /var/www/cms; vendor/bin/openapi lib -o web/swagger.json"

Application Structure

To find out more about the application code and how everything fits together, please refer to the developer docs.

Contributing

We would be delighted to accept contributions to the project - please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for further information.

Sponsorship

We've built commercial products and services on top of our open source project. If you want to support our work the best way is to become a customer. We're committed to keeping our project open source either way!

Reporting Problems

Support requests can be reported on the Xibo Community Forum. Verified, re-producable bugs with this repository can be reported in the Xibo parent repository.