Project Overview: Repository

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Purpose and Scope

The Content Repository is the core of Alfresco Content Services. The innovative features of the Alfresco Content Repository will establish best practices for easy to use document and content management that will make Alfresco Content Services the most widely adopted ECM system in the industry. The Alfresco Content Repository is contained in the content-services.war file, which contains the repository.jar.

The commercial offering of Alfresco Content Services is built on top of the open source Alfresco Community Edition code base. The differentiation strategy for the two products is outlined in these blog posts:

• https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2016/03/29/applying-the-open-core-model-in-alfresc...
• Our Commitment to a Strong Open Source Product
• Building a stronger open source product

The open source Alfresco Community Edition is intended for use in non-critical environments. It is best suited for developers and technical enthusiasts who are willing to self-support and don’t required the additional enterprise-class features offered by Alfresco Content Services (formerly known as Alfresco One Enterprise Edition). Customers of Alfresco who are entitled to the commercial offerings of Alfresco Content Services are able to access the source code of the proprietary product. The documentation and community issue tracking is the same between the commercial and open source products, but we recommend that issues related to the commercial products be raised through Alfresco support so that they can be prioritized and tracked appropriately.

The Alfresco Community Edition product is a collection of multiple open source projects that are also managed in this space.

As of the release of Alfresco Community Edition 5.1, integration with Microsoft Office applications is done using the proprietary Alfresco Office Services (AOS) module. We include AOS in Alfresco Community Edition as an optional proprietary module so that most users can benefit, but those who want a pure open source platform are not required to use it.

Documentation

http://docs.alfresco.com

Artifacts

Alfresco Community Edition:

• Community Edition file lists
• Alfresco Artifacts Repository

Alfresco Content Services / Alfresco One Enterprise Edition:

• Alfresco Support Portal
• Enterprise Artifacts Repository

Governance Model

The roadmap of the project is determined by Alfresco Product Management in response to customer needs and analysis of the market place. Open source contributions are considered for inclusion based on their quality, relevance to the current roadmap, and our quality assurance backlog.

License

Alfresco Community Edition is made available under the terms of the LGPLv3, except for the AOS module as explained above.

Source Code

The project is built from the following public Git repositories:

• Libraries
  • alfresco-repository https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-repository  
  • alfresco-remote-api https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-remote-api  
  • alfresco-greenmail https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-greenmail  
  • alfresco-file-transfer-receiver https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-file-transfer-receiver  
  • alfresco-mbeans https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-mbeans  
  • alfresco-mmt https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-mmt  
  • alfresco-server-root https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-server-root  
  • alfresco-data-model https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-data-model  
  • alfresco-core https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-core  
  • alfresco-xml-factory https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-xml-factory
  • alfresco-legacy-lucene https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-legacy-lucene  
• Packaging
  • acs-community-packaging GitHub - Alfresco/acs-community-packaging 

The packaging project creates the distribution artifacts: a war file and a zip file that wraps up Share, Repository, Search and related configuration files. The Alfresco Content Services version is determined by the packaging project, which pulls in the dependencies, as required. The libraries are on an independent build and release cycle, so there will probably be several minor library releases between each acs-community-packaging release.

In most repositories, new development is merged directly into the "master" branch and automated tests are used to ensure stability. In some repositories, new work is merged to a "develop" branch and only merged to "master" at the time of release.

Historical source repositories for this and related projects are listed on the page Legacy Source Code.

Issue Tracker

The team works from the "Repository (REPO)" project at http://issues.alfresco.com.

The public can raise issues in the ALF project at http://issues.alfresco.com, and they will be linked into the appropriate project during triage. See Reporting an Issue‌ for more instructions.

Subscribers to Alfresco support should report issues through the Alfresco Support Portal, so that they can be properly tracked and escalated.

Road Map

A high-level description of our current plans is on Content Repository Roadmap 2017‌.

Customers can escalate feature requests through Alfresco Support.

Architecture

The Enterprise Edition product is built on top of the Community Edition core.

We are also working on releasing the test framework and test cases for the features included in the open source module.

We are working on documenting the architecture.

Contribution Guidelines

See Submitting Contributions. You will need to accept the Alfresco Contribution Agreement before we can accept your contribution.

If you are interested in making a large contribution, please reach out to us before starting work so that we can discuss the likelihood of our accepting the contribution. In our experience, most large contributions to the ECM Repository are better implemented as modules.

All contributions should have an associated test case and follow the Coding Standards for Alfresco Content Services‌.