Try the Demo

The fastest way to see News Dashboard without setting up your own accounts, sources, or AI keys is demo mode: a throwaway instance seeded with sample articles and a read-only guest account.

Run it

From a clone of the repository:

docker compose -f docker-compose.demo.yml up

This starts a bundled PostgreSQL instance and the published News Dashboard image with DEMO_MODE=1. No .env file, API keys, or manual configuration are required.

Open http://localhost:8080 and sign in with:

Field	Value
Username	guest
Password	demo

What's seeded

On first boot, demo mode seeds deterministic, fully offline sample data — articles across categories like Python, AI/LLM, Rust, and cloud/infra, in a mix of read, unread, saved, and archived states. No network requests or LLM calls happen during seeding.

Guest account limitations

The guest account is read-only. You can browse the Today Feed, search, open articles, and explore the UI, but write actions (saving, marking read, snoozing, adding sources, changing settings, and similar) are rejected.

Next steps

Demo mode is for trying the app locally, not for a permanent or public instance. When you're ready to run your own instance for real, see the Quick Start in the README and the Self-Hosting guide.