Run SENAITE LIMS in under 5 minutes with Docker

The fastest way to look at SENAITE LIMS is not to install it. It is to pull the public Docker image and run it. The image is built nightly by the SENAITE community, ships the current 2.x release, and runs anywhere Docker runs.

This guide gets you from nothing to a working SENAITE on your laptop in under five minutes. No Python setup, no buildout, no dependency conflicts.

What you need

• Docker Desktop (Mac, Windows) or Docker Engine (Linux).
• One free port on localhost. We use 8080 in the examples.

That is the whole list.

Pull the image

docker pull senaite/senaite:2.x

The image is roughly 1 GB. On a normal home connection this takes under two minutes.

Start the container

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 senaite/senaite:2.x

• --rm removes the container when you stop it. Good for evaluation, not what you want in production.
• -p 8080:8080 maps the container port to your laptop.

After about thirty seconds you will see log output that ends with something like:

INFO Zope Ready to handle requests

That is your cue.

Open SENAITE

Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser. The Plone welcome page asks you to create a Zope admin account on first launch. Pick a username and password you will remember, because the --rm flag will throw it all away when you stop the container.

Then navigate to http://localhost:8080/senaite to enter SENAITE itself.

What you can do with this

Click around. Look at the sample registration form. Open a worksheet. Generate a report. Most labs spend their first hour in SENAITE under-clicking, because the demo looks empty without configured analysis services and sample types.

Two recommended next steps:

1. Add demo data. One more command and the system fills with realistic content: clients, sample types, methods, analysis services. See Provision SENAITE with demo data.
2. Read the user manual. The official walk-through covers sample reception, worksheet creation, result entry, and verification.

What this is not

This Docker run is for evaluation only. Three reasons you do not put this in production as-is:

• --rm deletes everything on stop. No persistence.
• No HTTPS, no reverse proxy, no authentication beyond Plone’s own.
• The default ZEO storage is fine for a laptop, not for a lab with ten analysts and an instrument feed.

For production we recommend the Ubuntu 24.04 install guide, followed by managed monitoring under SENAITE Care.

When the five minutes is up

If SENAITE looks like a fit, the next step is usually our 3-day workshop. You bring real lab data and leave on Friday with a configured system, a VM you can take home, and a GitHub repo for the customisations. Most production SENAITE installations we know started with one of those.

Questions while you click around? Get in touch and we will help.