Grist on Docker

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I notice that I can install GRIST on my server, using docker. I’m wondering what are the pros and cons of it.

Thanks in advance.

Eduardo

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Hi @Eduardo_Dalcin - I am new to Grist and just actually have set up Grist on Docker. Would be good to hear from the Grist Team what the answer would be to your question!

From what I can see for now on my own instance, it has no user authentication (there’s just one user “You”), there’s no access to custom plugins repository, no access to “Examples and templates”.
You can however add new Workspaces.

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Hi Pawel. Thanks for your reply, and welcome!

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It’s worth clarifying that those ‘unavailable’ things are only not present ‘out-of-the-box’, it’s completely possible to have a multi-user setup, with all the same custom widget plugins, using Docker, it just needs a little extra setup. (I do exactly this).

  • For custom widgets, see: https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-widget
  • For authentication, you need an external authentication provider. You can either use a SAML provider, or a reverse proxy with authentication middleware. This is not exactly trivial to set-up, I just thought it worth mentioning as being possible. I personally use Authelia with forwardauth, and it works brilliantly.

As for pros, I find a few key pros to using the self-hosted version:

  1. Ownership of my own data (it’s not on someone else’s server)
  2. No limitations based on pricing-plan (10 documents on the free version etc.)
  3. It is possible to customise the environment with other python libraries which can be used inside sheets.
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Thanks @T_L, as I started to look more into the documentation indeed I saw those cons can be overcome with more or less effort, depending on feature.

The problem is while the documentation for using the tool is quite comprehensive, the docs for configuration topics and setup is spread around in different locations so it is harder to wrap head around.
Most valuable for me was looking through the env variables list available in readme.md on github.

BTW I was starting to use Baserow, though when I found Grist I’m willing to switch. Grist looks less polished and its version number sounds risky (compared to Baserow’s) but after playing around it definitely is more flexible and easily extensible (developing custom widgets looks very simple).

Nice thing about Baserow is it clearly compares self hosted version option to the functionality available on hosted plans (the drawback is Baserows self hosted version has still some functionality locked, which seems not to be the case for Grist I think)

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