The most interesting Open Source web applications
Tags: opensource, discuss, webdev, devops
Published: 2023-06-15 07:22:24

---
title: The most interesting Open Source web applications
published: true
description: Find open source web applications to learn about the operations side of web application development as well.
tags: opensource, discuss, webdev, devops
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# Use a ratio of 100:42 for best results.
# published_at: 2023-06-15 06:35 +0000
series: opensource
---

Learning how to develop a web application in your own corner is challenging, but also lonely. How can you really learn how real web applications are being developed?

Challenging as it is, but it is still relatively easy to learn how to create a web application in Flask, Django, Rails, Dancer, or any of the other popular web frameworks. However there is a lot more to it than just writing the code. Security? Deployment? Maintenance? Upgrade? Caching? Reverse proxy? DNS? Just to name a few aspects.

It is much harder to gain experience on the operations side of a web application, but today, at good companies there is a tight integration between development and operations.

Luckily there are quite a few live web applications (not frameworks!) that you can contribute to.

I'll list a few that came to my mind. I'd love to hear your suggestions. Either as someone who contributed to these or that you wish you did.

## Popular projects

* Obviously [Forem](https://www.forem.com/) that is the source code behind [DEV.to](https://dev.to/) written in **Ruby on Rails**. ♦️

* [Wordpress](https://wordpress.org/) written in **PHP** is open source web application with the largest user-base. I think [wordpress.com](https://wordpress.com/) is not open source, but there are plenty of stand-alone Wordpress installations using the open source code only. [source code](https://wordpress.org/download/source/) 🍐

* [GitLab](https://about.gitlab.com/) that runs [GitLab.com](https://gitlab.com/) and is installed at plenty of corporations. Written in **Ruby**. [source code](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) ♦️

* [Phorge](https://phorge.it/) is another git hosting platform written in **PHP**. One installation of it is for [FreeBSD](https://reviews.freebsd.org/) another is [this one](https://we.phorge.it/) 🍐

* [Wikipedia](https://www.wikipedia.org/) that runs on [MediaWiki](https://www.mediawiki.org/) which is written in **PHP**. [source code](https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki) 🍐

* [MetaCPAN](https://metacpan.org/). There are a number of project in the **Perl** community. This is one of the most interesting ones. [source code](https://github.com/metacpan/) 🐪

* [Zulip](https://zulip.com/) an open source alternative to Slack and Discord. Written in Python using Django. Check out their [community](https://chat.zulip.org/) and [source code](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/) 🐍

## My projects

Maybe less popular, but these are mine 😀:

* [PyDigger](https://pydigger.com/) **Python** 🐍
* [CPAN Digger](https://cpan-digger.perlmaven.com/) **Perl** 🐪
* [Ruby Digger](https://ruby-digger.code-maven.com/) **Ruby** ♦️
* [Kantoniko](https://kantoniko.com/) **Python** 🐍, **JavaScript**
* [OSDC](https://osdc.code-maven.com/) and the [Open Source Organizations](https://osdc.code-maven.com/open-source-by-organizations/) **Python** 🐍