How to try Orbeon Forms?

Use the online demo site

The Orbeon Forms online demo site is a publicly-accessible version of Orbeon Forms which you can freely access. This provides access to limited functionality but showcases most of the features of Form Builder, and many features of Form Runner.

NOTE: All forms and data entered on the demo site is public and accessible by other users.

Use Docker

Docker is a popular container system. If you have Docker installed on a computer, you can run Orbeon Forms PE with a single command. This is a great way to try Orbeon Forms PE without complex installation steps on your computer. Here is what you need to do:

  1. Get a free Orbeon Forms PE trial license and download it to the computer where you have Docker installed.

  2. Run the following command, taking care of replacing /path/to/license.xml with the actual path to your license file (you can change the first 8080 port if you’d like a different local port):

     docker run \
 --name orbeon-forms-with-sqlite \
 -p 8080:8080 \
 -v /path/to/license.xml:/usr/local/tomcat/webapps/orbeon/WEB-INF/resources/config/license.xml \
 orbeon/orbeon-forms:2024.1-pe
  3. Access the URL http://my-computer:8080/orbeon in your web browser, where my-computer is the hostname of the computer on which you have installed Docker (for example localhost if it’s your own local computer). And that’s it!

For more details, see this blog post and the Docker section of the Orbeon Forms documentation.

NOTE: You can stop and start the container as you wish, but if you delete the container, you will lose the demo SQLite database and any forms or data you might have created.

Use a local installation

You can also install Orbeon Forms PE on your own computer or server using manual steps. This will require you to have:

  1. A Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on your computer.
  2. A Java servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat, installed on your computer.
  3. The Orbeon Forms PE WAR file, which you can get from the downloads page.

For more details, see the Installation section of the Orbeon Forms documentation.

Further steps

Once you have Orbeon Forms running, you can go beyond the simple steps above and install, for example, a separate SQL database.

For more details, see the Orbeon Forms documentation: