Self-hosting overview

Imprime is open source (Apache 2.0) and designed to be self-hosted: keep your templates, your data and your generated documents on your own servers.

Architecture

Imprime runs as one Node.js process serving everything on a single port, backed by MongoDB:

                 ┌──────────────────────── Imprime (Node.js, port 3023) ───────────────────────┐
 Browser ──────► │  /                → editor (React app, static files)                        │
 Scripts ──────► │  /api/*           → REST API (templates, pages, variables, images)     │
 AI agents ────► │  /api/mcp         → MCP server (Streamable HTTP)                            │
                 │  /api/auth/*      → authentication (Better Auth: email, SSO, API keys, OAuth) │
                 │  /api/export/*    → PDF renderer (@react-pdf, embedded fonts)               │
                 └──────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────┘
                                                        │
                                                   MongoDB  (templates, images, users, keys)

The monorepo contains four packages:

Package	Role
`packages/backend`	Express API, MCP server, authentication, PDF rendering
`packages/frontend`	React + Ant Design editor, served by the backend in production
`packages/common`	Shared types, rendering helpers and fonts
`packages/sdk`	TypeScript API client

Requirements

Docker (recommended), or Node.js 18+ to build from source.
MongoDB — any recent version (self-hosted, Docker, or a managed service such as Atlas).
A domain with HTTPS for production — required for SSO callbacks and MCP OAuth.
Resources: PDF rendering is CPU-bound; 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM is enough to start.

Next steps

DockerRun Imprime and MongoDB with Docker Compose.

ConfigurationEvery environment variable explained.

Authentication & SSOGoogle, Microsoft, GitHub and email verification.

Production checklistHTTPS, reverse proxy, backups, scaling.