Deploying Gephi Lite

You can easily deploy Gephi Lite in your environment.
This guide explains several ways to do it.

Using Docker

We provide an official Docker image of Gephi Lite: Docker Hub - ouestware/gephi-lite

The image contains a built version of Gephi Lite, served by Nginx on port 80.

To use it, open your terminal and run the following commands:

docker pull ouestware/gephi-lite:latest
docker run --name gephi-lite -d -p 80:80 ouestware/gephi-lite:latest

Then open http://localhost in your browser.

Using Docker Compose (local development)

The Gephi Lite repository also provides a docker-compose.yml file. It runs Gephi Lite directly from the sources, in development mode, without installing Node.js on your computer. It is designed for local development, not for production.

From a clone of the repository (see below), run:

docker compose up

Then open http://localhost:5173/gephi-lite/ in your browser. Run docker compose down to stop it.

info

The sources folder is mounted with the :z option, so this also works on SELinux systems (Fedora, etc.).

Build from Source

Gephi Lite is a React application. To build it, you need Node.js (version 24, with npm) and Git installed on your computer.

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/gephi/gephi-lite.git
cd gephi-lite

2. Install dependencies:

npm install

3. Build the project:

export BASE_URL=/ && npm run build

info

By default, the build process creates a website that must be served under the /gephi-lite path (e.g. http://localhost/gephi-lite/).

In the example above, we set the environment variable BASE_URL to / so the application can be served at the root of the domain. You can adjust it to any path you prefer.

Other environment variables can be set at build time:

• VITE_GITHUB_PROXY: URL of the GitHub proxy used for the GitHub integration (default: /_github, see the Nginx example below)
• VITE_CHECK_LATEST_VERSION: set it to true to show a message on the welcome modal when a newer Gephi Lite version is available (default: false)
• VITE_VERSION_URL: URL of the JSON file listing Gephi Lite versions, used by the previous option (default: https://lite.gephi.org/versions.json)

4. The static files of the Gephi Lite application are built in the folder:

./packages/gephi-lite/build/

You can copy these files to any location, for example /var/www/html/gephi-lite or start a web server in this directory:

With python

python -m http.server
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 (http://0.0.0.0:8000/) ...

With NPM

npx http-serve
Starting up http-serve for ./
Available on:
  http://127.0.0.1:8081

5. Configure your web server (Apache, Nginx, etc.) to serve this folder.
   Here’s an Nginx example:

server {
  listen 80 default_server;
  listen [::]:80 default_server;
  server_name _;

  # Replace this location with the one where you placed the Gephi Lite files
  root /var/www/html/gephi-lite;

  # Required for React applications
  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
  }

  # For GitHub authentication to work
  # We need to create a GitHub proxy to `https://github.com/login` that accepts CORS
  location /_github/login {
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*";
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET, POST, OPTIONS";
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept, user-agent";

    if ($request_method = OPTIONS) {
      return 204;
    }

    proxy_pass https://github.com/login;
  }
}

External resources

Gephi Lite runs fully in the browser, but some features load resources from other servers:

• The map background loads its tiles from MapLibre demo tiles by default. Users can point the map style to other tiles, for instance ones hosted on your own servers.
• The GitHub integration needs the GitHub proxy described above.
• The new version message calls VITE_VERSION_URL, if VITE_CHECK_LATEST_VERSION is true.