docassemble Guided Interview and Document Assembly

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## docassemble - Guided Interviews and Document Assembly, Ready to Run on AWS

docassemble is the open source expert system for guided interviews and automated document assembly. It leads a user through a branching question-and-answer interview, validates the answers, and assembles the results into finished PDF and Word documents from templates. Interviews are authored in a readable YAML format with Python logic, so complex conditional workflows, calculations and document generation run without bespoke application code. Originally built for the legal-aid community, docassemble is used by legal services organizations, courts, government agencies and businesses to automate court forms, benefits applications and contracts.

This AMI delivers docassemble fully installed and configured the official non-Docker way, so you have a complete guided-interview and document-assembly platform running within minutes of launch.

## Why This AMI Over Manual Installation

• Zero manual setup: the docassemble web application, its uWSGI server, two Celery background workers, the websockets server, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ and an nginx reverse proxy are pre-configured and start automatically on first boot. What typically takes hours of manual virtualenv, database, broker and reverse-proxy setup is reduced to minutes.
• No shared credentials: a one-shot service generates a unique application secret key, a unique PostgreSQL password and a single administrator account per instance, stored in a root-only file. The upstream default admin (admin@admin.com / password) is never created.
• The full document-assembly stack included: pandoc, LibreOffice, a TeX Live subset, poppler, tesseract OCR and PDF tooling are installed, so PDF and DOCX assembly works out of the box, not just the interview UI.
• Independently resizable storage: the PostgreSQL database and the docassemble file store live on a dedicated EBS volume you can expand without touching the root volume.
• Automatic URL configuration: the instance address is set as the docassemble external hostname and URL root on first boot, so the web interface works immediately.

Compared to a manual install, this image removes the typical multi-hour setup of the Python virtualenv, database and message-broker provisioning, reverse-proxy configuration, the document toolchain, and credential hardening.

## Application Stack

docassemble runs as a Python 3.12 application: uWSGI serves the web app, two Celery workers run background jobs, and a websockets server drives the live interview UI. PostgreSQL, Redis (cache and sessions) and RabbitMQ (the Celery broker) are all bound to loopback, with nginx fronting port 80. The architecture suits single-instance deployments for evaluation and small-to-medium production use.

## Security Posture

• Fresh, unique application secret key, PostgreSQL password and administrator account generated per instance on first boot
• The upstream default administrator account is never shipped
• Credentials stored in a root-only file - never exposed in user-accessible locations
• PostgreSQL, Redis and RabbitMQ bound to loopback; only SSH and the web ports are reachable
• Dedicated storage volume isolates interview data and documents from the operating system
• Deployed within your own VPC for full network isolation using AWS security groups

## Use Cases

Legal Aid and Access to Justice: organizations that guide members of the public through court forms, benefits applications or intake interviews can deploy docassemble privately to assemble the finished documents while keeping applicant data in their own VPC.

Government and Courts: publish guided interviews that collect structured information and generate official documents, hosted on infrastructure the agency controls.

Business Document Automation: automate contracts, letters and structured forms through branching interviews, replacing error-prone manual document preparation without routing data through a third-party SaaS.

## cloudimg Support - Included 24/7

This product includes professional support from cloudimg engineers covering deployment assistance, upgrades, performance tuning, interview and package authoring guidance, TLS termination setup, SMTP configuration, and PostgreSQL administration. Critical issues receive a one-hour average response time. For sizing, docassemble runs uWSGI, two Celery workers, PostgreSQL, Redis and RabbitMQ together, so an instance with at least 2 vCPUs and 8 GB RAM (e.g. m5.large or larger) is recommended.

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docassemble is open source software released under the MIT License. cloudimg is not affiliated with or endorsed by the docassemble project; the name is used only to identify the software packaged in this image. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.