doccano

doccano is an open-source text annotation tool for humans. It provides annotation features for text classification, sequence labeling, and sequence to sequence tasks. You can create labeled data for sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text summarization, and so on. Just create a project, upload data, and start annotating. You can build a dataset in hours.

Demo

Try the annotation demo.

Documentation

Read the documentation at https://doccano.github.io/doccano/.

Features

• Collaborative annotation
• Multi-language support
• Mobile support
• Emoji 😄 support
• Dark theme
• RESTful API

Usage

There are three options to run doccano:

• pip (Python 3.8+)
• Docker
• Docker Compose

pip

To install doccano, run:

pip install doccano

By default, SQLite 3 is used for the default database. If you want to use PostgreSQL, install the additional dependencies:

pip install 'doccano[postgresql]'

and set the DATABASE_URL environment variable according to your PostgreSQL credentials:

DATABASE_URL="postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@${POSTGRES_HOST}:${POSTGRES_PORT}/${POSTGRES_DB}?sslmode=disable"

After installation, run the following commands:

# Initialize database.
doccano init
# Create a super user.
doccano createuser --username admin --password pass
# Start a web server.
doccano webserver --port 8000

In another terminal, run the command:

# Start the task queue to handle file upload/download.
doccano task

Go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/.

Docker

As a one-time setup, create a Docker container as follows:

docker pull doccano/doccano
docker container create --name doccano \
  -e "ADMIN_USERNAME=admin" \
  -e "ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@example.com" \
  -e "ADMIN_PASSWORD=password" \
  -v doccano-db:/data \
  -p 8000:8000 doccano/doccano

Next, start doccano by running the container:

docker container start doccano

Go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/.

To stop the container, run docker container stop doccano -t 5. All data created in the container will persist across restarts.

If you want to use the latest features, specify the nightly tag:

docker pull doccano/doccano:nightly

Docker Compose

You need to install Git and clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/doccano/doccano.git
cd doccano

Note for Windows developers: Be sure to configure git to correctly handle line endings or you may encounter status code 127 errors while running the services in future steps. Running with the git config options below will ensure your git directory correctly handles line endings.

git clone https://github.com/doccano/doccano.git --config core.autocrlf=input

Then, create an .env file with variables in the following format (see ./docker/.env.example):

# platform settings
ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
ADMIN_PASSWORD=password
ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@example.com

# rabbit mq settings
RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER=doccano
RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS=doccano

# database settings
POSTGRES_USER=doccano
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=doccano
POSTGRES_DB=doccano

After running the following command, access http://127.0.0.1/.

docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.prod.yml --env-file .env up

One-click Deployment

Service	Button
AWS1
Heroku

FAQ

• How to create a user
• How to add a user to your project
• How to change the password

See the documentation for details.

Contribution

As with any software, doccano is under continuous development. If you have requests for features, please file an issue describing your request. Also, if you want to see work towards a specific feature, feel free to contribute by working towards it. The standard procedure is to fork the repository, add a feature, fix a bug, then file a pull request that your changes are to be merged into the main repository and included in the next release.

Here are some tips might be helpful. How to Contribute to Doccano Project

Citation

@misc{doccano,
  title={{doccano}: Text Annotation Tool for Human},
  url={https://github.com/doccano/doccano},
  note={Software available from https://github.com/doccano/doccano},
  author={
    Hiroki Nakayama and
    Takahiro Kubo and
    Junya Kamura and
    Yasufumi Taniguchi and
    Xu Liang},
  year={2018},
}

Contact

For help and feedback, feel free to contact the author.

Doccano Development Environment

This repository contains scripts to easily set up and run a development environment for Doccano.

Requirements

• Python 3.10
• Poetry (Python package manager)
• Yarn (JavaScript package manager)
• Git
• PostgreSQL (optional, configured by default)

Database Configuration

The development environment is configured to use PostgreSQL with these default settings:

# Create a new role for development
createuser doccano --pwprompt

# Create a new database for development
createdb doccano -O doccano

# Grant all privileges on the database to the doccano role
psql -c "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE doccano TO doccano;"

If you prefer to use a different database system, you can change the configuration in docker-compose.override.yml and update the DATABASE_URL in your .env file accordingly.

Quick Start

After cloning the repository, run the setup script to install all dependencies:

./setup.sh

This script will:

1. Verify Python 3.10 is installed
2. Configure Poetry to use Python 3.10
3. Install backend Python dependencies using Poetry
4. Install frontend JavaScript dependencies using Yarn
5. Offer to start the development environment

Starting the Development Environment

To start the development environment later, run:

./start_dev.sh

This will start:

• Frontend development server with hot-reload
• Django backend server
• Celery worker

Components

• Frontend: Nuxt.js application running at http://localhost:3000
• Backend: Django application running at http://localhost:8000
• Task Queue: Celery worker for handling background tasks

Development

See the README files in the frontend and backend directories for more detailed information about each component.

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1. (1) EC2 KeyPair cannot be created automatically, so make sure you have an existing EC2 KeyPair in one region. Or create one yourself. (2) If you want to access doccano via HTTPS in AWS, here is an instruction. ↩︎