Installation

Plume ships as a single static Go binary with the web UI embedded. Run it with Docker, or drop the binary next to PostgreSQL.

Docker (recommended)

The compose file bundles Plume and Postgres with sensible defaults.

services:
  plume:
    image: ghcr.io/plume-newsletter/plume:latest
    ports: ["8080:8080"]
    environment:
      PLUME_DATABASE_URL: postgres://plume:plume@db:5432/plume?sslmode=disable
      PLUME_COOKIE_SECRET: change-me-to-at-least-32-bytes-long
      PLUME_SECRET_KEY: 32-byte-key-exactly-0123456789ab
      PLUME_ADMIN_EMAIL: you@example.com
      PLUME_ADMIN_PASSWORD: change-me
      PLUME_BASE_URL: http://localhost:8080
    depends_on: [db]
  db:
    image: postgres:16

Single binary

Prefer no Docker? Download a release binary and point it at a Postgres connection string. Configuration is by environment variable; running the binary starts the server, runs migrations, and launches the background workers.

curl -L https://github.com/plume-newsletter/plume/releases/latest/download/plume-linux-amd64 -o plume
chmod +x plume
PLUME_DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost/plume \
PLUME_COOKIE_SECRET=change-me-to-at-least-32-bytes-long \
PLUME_SECRET_KEY=32-byte-key-exactly-0123456789ab \
  ./plume

Behind a reverse proxy

Terminate TLS at nginx or Caddy and proxy to port 8080. Set PLUME_BASE_URL to your public HTTPS URL so tracking links and unsubscribe pages resolve correctly, and set PLUME_SECURE_COOKIES=true so session cookies are marked Secure.

Database

Plume needs PostgreSQL 14 or newer. Migrations are embedded in the binary (goose) and run automatically at startup — there is no separate migrate step or command.

Upgrading

Pull the new image (or binary) and restart. Migrations are forward-only and run on boot. Always check the changelog for breaking notes before a major bump.