Behind the scene, on the server, Orbeon Forms is built as a Java web application. In order to install it on your own server, local or in the cloud, however, requires some fluency in technologies such as Java, Tomcat, and possibly relational databases. We have been wanting to make things easier for a long time, with the use of containers.
The good news is that earlier this year, we have started to provide Docker images for Orbeon Forms for the 2023.1 maintenance releases. This means that you can now run Orbeon Forms without having to install Java or Tomcat! You just need to have Docker installed, and you can download and run Orbeon Forms with a single command.
While using Docker works great for just testing or evaluating Orbeon Forms, it can also be used for running Orbeon Forms in production, especially if you are already using Docker for other parts of your infrastructure.
For steps, see:
- The Try page for a quick start.
- The detailed instructions, including steps to compose Orbeon Forms with the PostgreSQL database.
We are working on making it even easier to do so in the future.
We hope you’ll like this new feature of Orbeon Forms!