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Gramps Connect is a faster, real-time-collaborative web frontend for Gramps, the free genealogy software, built against the gramps-web-api server. It follows the same layout and vocabulary as Gramps itself, stays fast even on very large trees, and is built for more than one person to work on the same tree at the same time.
It comes in two forms: a standalone desktop build you can run on your own machine today (gramps-connect-desktop), and a containerized, multi-user deployment for hosting a tree a whole family logs into and shares. The interface is identical either way — the only difference is whether anyone else is in the tree with you.
This wiki covers what the app does, how it's put together, and how to run or develop it.
- Overview — a tour of what Gramps Connect actually does: live collaboration, automatically generated life stories, photo tagging, search, charts, maps, editing, and the add-on catalog.
- Installing (gramps-connect-desktop) — download and run the single-user desktop build on Windows, macOS, or Linux.
- Deploying — run the real multi-user, server-hosted version for a family to share.
- Messaging — Discussions: threads with a title, optionally linked to any number of records, for anything from a quick comment on one record to a full research goal gathering its sources and citations.
- GOQL: the search query language — the optional, more powerful mode (a checkbox away) for every list view's search box, for filtering the tree with joins and backlinks a plain-text search can't express.
- Gramplets and the Add-on Store — small, editable Python programs that run in your browser and extend the app.
- Data Model and Editing — the ten record types Gramps Connect works with, and an honest account of what's fully editable today versus what isn't yet.
- FAQ — common questions about the desktop build, data safety, and how it compares to Gramps Desktop.
- Architecture — how the local-first cache and live sync actually work, and how the repo is laid out.
- Under the Hood — smaller implementation notes and gotchas, like what's stored in the browser and how it's scoped.
- Development — getting a dev environment running, testing, and translations.
- Roadmap and Known Limitations — what's still missing and what's actively being worked on.
Gramps Connect reads and writes the same file formats as Gramps Desktop and gramps-web (GEDCOM and Gramps XML), so a tree can move freely between all of them.
