Synapse

Synapse aims to provide an integrated groupware and e-mail communication solution for businesses, by combining and integrating Nextcloud and Stalwart Mail Server.

Stack 🥞

• Groupware: Nextcloud
• Email: Stalwart
• Proxy: Caddy
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Cache: Valkey

Requirements

• OS: Linux or macOS. Synapse is used, developed and known to work on Debian 13 and macOS 26.
• Docker
• Docker Compose 5.3.0 or higher (with support for init containers)

Deployment

Copy .env.example to .env and set the variables accordingly. Run ensure_env.sh to validate your settings and generate secure values for any missing secrets, then start the containers.

./ensure_env.sh
docker compose --profile=document_server,backup up -d

To upgrade, first pull the latest version of the repository, then run upgrade.sh to pull and restart the containers.

Development setup

It is required to set up the following hostnames in your /etc/hosts file by running:

echo "" >> /etc/hosts
echo "127.0.0.1 synapse.test" >> /etc/hosts
echo "127.0.0.1 nextcloud.synapse.test" >> /etc/hosts
echo "127.0.0.1 stalwart.synapse.test" >> /etc/hosts

After cloning the repository, set up the development environment by running the following.

./ensure_env_dev.sh
docker compose --profile=document_server up -d

If you wish to override any variable, create a .env.local file and set the variables you want to override before running ensure_env_dev.sh. This makes the .env file is disposable: when you wish to modify the environment, you can simply change the .env.local file, delete the .env file and run ensure_env_dev.sh again.

If you want to start over, the following can be executed in order to remove all containers and data. Then run the above commands again to spin up a fresh environment again.

docker compose --profile=document_server down -v
rm -rf .env {nextcloud,stalwart,postgres,valkey,dev_rustfs}/data stalwart/etc

If COMPOSE_PROFILES is not set, you might run into errors like service "nextcloud" depends on undefined service "nextcloud_push": invalid compose project.

About

Synapse is developed at Smart Yellow and licensed under the AGPLv3. Feel free to contribute or drop us a line!