THIS IS THE SUCCESSOR OF THE DISCONTINUED Aleph VERSION

"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

OpenAleph: Empowering Investigative Research

OpenAleph is a free, open source platform designed to empower investigative journalists, researchers, and curious minds. With OpenAleph, you can explore vast amounts of documents and datasets quickly: Uncovering connections, correlations, and insights that help reveal the bigger story.

Why OpenAleph?

• Intuitive Data Indexing: Quickly search and analyze both unstructured documents (PDFs, Word files, HTML) and structured data (CSV, XLS, SQL).
• Powerful Cross-Referencing: Easily track well-known entities—like names and companies—across datasets to support your investigations.
• Community Driven: OpenAleph is developed and maintained by the Data and Research Center (DARC) alongside a passionate community.
• Industry Standard: Under the hood, OpenAleph relies on the FollowTheMoney data schema which is used by many other projects.

Get Started

Discover how to install, use, and contribute to OpenAleph through our documentation.

OpenAleph can be deployed locally with Docker, for testing purposes:

1. Run cp aleph.env.tmpl aleph.env and then edit aleph.env. Assign a value to ALEPH_SECRET_KEY — the Docker images already default to the bundled postgres, elasticsearch and redis services; see the Docker setup guide for more configuration options. You can also set ALEPH_SINGLE_USER=true or create an admin user following the instructions in the documentation.
2. Run docker compose -f docker-compose.example.yml up -d to start the full stack with prebuilt images (or make up to run it in the foreground).
3. Once Elasticsearch reports a green health status in the logs, run docker compose -f docker-compose.example.yml run --rm worker aleph upgrade to initialize the database and search index.
4. Navigate to http://localhost:8080/.

This deployment method should not be used for production environments. The technical documentation details different ways to run OpenAleph in production.

Join the Conversation

Connect with fellow researchers, developers, and enthusiasts on our community platform at darc.social. Whether you have questions, need support, or want to share your ideas, you're always welcome!

How to Contribute

We invite contributions of all kinds: code improvements, bug reports, feature ideas, or even better documentation. To help us grow together, please review our contribution guidelines. Make sure you familiarize yourself with our Code of Conduct, too.

Need Support?

If you need help using OpenAleph, we encourage you to consult our documentation first. Community support is available via GitHub and our community platform on darc.social. For guaranteed support with formal service agreements, please refer to our managed services offering.

License

OpenAleph is open source software. See the LICENSE file for details.

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Standing on the shoulders of giants: OpenAleph builds on the brilliant work of the many contributors of the Aleph project, its predecessor. We've published a blog post about the decision to fork and continue the OpenAleph open source project here.