Installation

This section describes the various methods of installing ColdFront. New releases of ColdFront may introduce breaking changes. Please refer to the upgrading section and changelog for more information.

Downloading

ColdFront releases can be downloaded from PyPI or on GitHub here.

Requirements

ColdFront requires Python 3+

Installation Methods

Install via uv (recommended)

The recommended way of installing ColdFront is via uv:

$ uv tool install coldfront[ldap,freeipa,oidc]

Install via pip

ColdFront can be installed via pip inside a virtual environment:

$ python3 -mvenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install --upgrade pip
# Adjust extras to suite your needs
$ pip install coldfront[ldap,freeipa,oidc,pg]

Install from source

$ git clone https://github.com/coldfront/coldfront.git
$ cd coldfront
$ uv sync --group dev

Configuring ColdFront

For complete documentation on configuring ColdFront see here. ColdFront can be configured via environment variables, an environment file, or a python file which can be used for more advanced configuration settings. ColdFront requires a database and if you don't configure one it will use SQLite by default.

Developing ColdFront

If you're interested in hacking on the ColdFront source code you can install by cloning our GitHub repo and install via uv. Note the master branch is the bleeding edge version and may be unstable. You can also checkout one of the tagged releases.

$ git clone https://github.com/coldfront/coldfront.git
$ cd coldfront
$ uv sync --group dev

git tag -l
git checkout v1.x.x

Initializing the ColdFront database

ColdFront supports MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. See the complete guide on configuring ColdFront for more details. By default, ColdFront will use SQLite and create a database file in your current working directory.

After configuring your database of choice you must first initialize the ColdFront database. This should only be done once:

$ uv run coldfront initial_setup
Running migrations:
  Applying contenttypes.0001_initial... OK
  Applying auth.0001_initial... OK
  ....
  ....

After the above command completes the ColdFront database is ready for use.

Creating the super user account

Run the command below to create a new super user account:

$ uv run coldfront createsuperuser

Running ColdFront server

ColdFront is a Django application and comes with a simple web server to get started quickly. This is good for evaluating ColdFront and testing/demo purposes. Run the following command to start the development web server:

$ DEBUG=True uv run coldfront runserver

Point your browser to http://localhost:8000 and login with the super user account you created.

Loading the sample test data

If you're interested in evaluating ColdFront we provide an easy way to load some test data so you can get a feel for how ColdFront works. Run this command to load the test data set:

$ uv run coldfront load_test_data

• You can log in as admin with password test1234.
• You can log in as a PI using username cgray with password test1234.
• You can log in as center director using username csimmons with password test1234.
• Password for all users is also test1234.