> listmonk is **alpha** software and may change and break. Use with caution. That said, it has been in active use at [zerodha.com](https://zerodha.com) for several months where it has processed hundreds of campaigns and tens of millions of e-mails.
listmonk is a standalone, self-hosted, newsletter and mailing list manager. It is fast, feature-rich, and packed into a single binary. It uses a PostgreSQL database as its data store.
- Download the [latest release](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/releases) for your platform and extract the listmonk binary. For example: `tar -C $HOME/listmonk -xzf listmonk_$VERSION_$OS_$ARCH.tar.gz`
- Navigate to the directory containing the binary (`cd $HOME/listmonk`) and run `./listmonk --new-config` to generate a sample `config.toml` and add your configuration (SMTP and Postgres DB credentials primarily).
- Since there is no user auth yet, it's best to put listmonk behind a proxy like Nginx and setup basicauth on all endpoints except for the few endpoints that need to be public. Here is a [sample nginx config](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/wiki/Production-Nginx-config) for production use.
You can checkout the [docker-compose.yml](docker-compose.yml) to get an idea of how to run `listmonk` with `PostgreSQL` together using Docker (also see [configuring with environment variables](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/wiki/Configuration)).
Alternatively, to run a demo of listmonk, you can quickly spin up a container `docker-compose up -d demo-db demo-app`. NOTE: This doesn't persist Postgres data after you stop and remove the container, this setup is intended only for demo. _DO NOT_ use the demo setup in production.
Using the [Nginx buildpack](https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nginx) can be used to deploy listmonk on Heroku and use Nginx as a proxy to setup basicauth.
This one-click [Heroku deploy button](https://github.com/bumi/listmonk-heroku) provides an automated default deployment.
Please note that [configuration options](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/wiki/Configuration) must be set using [environment configruation variables](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/config-vars).
listmonk is free, open source software licensed under AGPLv3. There are several essential features such as user auth/management and bounce tracking that are currently missing. Contributions are welcome.
The backend is written in Go and the frontend is in React with Ant Design for UI. See [developer setup](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/wiki/Developer-setup) to get started.
