Self-hosting the backend

The API is a Django 5 + Django REST Framework project backed by PostgreSQL and Redis. Source: taskforge-backend.

Quick start with Docker

The fastest path: Postgres, Redis and the API in one command:

git clone https://github.com/Abdullah-Masood-05/taskforge-backend.git
cd taskforge-backend

# 1. Copy the example environment file and adjust values as needed
cp .env.example .env

# 2. Build and start everything
docker compose up --build -d

Migrations and demo seeding run automatically on first start. You now have:

• API at http://localhost:8000/api/v1/
• Swagger UI at http://localhost:8000/api/v1/docs/
• Redoc at http://localhost:8000/api/v1/redoc/
• Health check at http://localhost:8000/health/

Running it without Docker

You'll need Python 3.12, PostgreSQL and Redis running locally.

# 1. Create a virtual environment (uv shown; python -m venv works too)
uv venv --python 3.12
uv pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

# 2. Point .env at your Postgres/Redis (see .env.example)

# 3. Migrate and seed
uv run python manage.py migrate
uv run python manage.py seed

# 4. Run the server
uv run python manage.py runserver 127.0.0.1:8000

seed creates a demo organization and users; add the fully populated showcase project with:

uv run python manage.py seed_demo_project --large-project --reset

See Demo data for what that includes.

Environment variables

The essentials (full list in .env.example):

Variable	Purpose
SECRET_KEY	Django secret, generate a long random value
DATABASE_URL	Postgres DSN, e.g. postgres://user:pass@localhost:5432/taskforge
REDIS_URL	Redis DSN, e.g. redis://localhost:6379/0
ALLOWED_HOSTS	Comma-separated hostnames for production
CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS	Your frontend's origin(s)
DEBUG	False in production

Production notes

• Serve with an ASGI server (the project ships with Daphne), the notification layer uses Django Channels over WebSockets.
• Point your platform's health check at /health/. The endpoint is deliberately exempt from API rate limiting. Platform probes fire every few seconds and must never be throttled into a 429/restart loop.
• Run python manage.py migrate on every deploy; migrations are data-preserving.
• The test suite (pytest) covers models, permissions and the API, run it against your configuration before going live.

Deploying to Render

The repository includes a render.yaml blueprint, create a new Blueprint service from the repo and Render provisions the web service and database. Set the environment variables above in the service settings, and make sure the service's health check path is /health/.