Run Shillinq locally

Shillinq is a Nextcloud app built on OpenRegister. Reading about what it does is not the same as clicking through it, and standing up a Nextcloud by hand to find out is more work than most people will do on a first look.

This tutorial removes that step. One file, two commands, and you are looking at the real thing.

This is a demo, not a development environment. It runs the real software and behaves the same way, so what you learn here carries over to a real deployment. But nothing is backed up, and docker compose down -v deletes all of it. Explore freely; do not put real data in it.

Step 1: Check your Compose version

docker compose version

You need v2.23 or newer. This matters more than a version check usually does: the compose file declares its install scripts inline, using a feature older versions do not have — and they do not complain. They ignore the field, start Nextcloud with no applications installed, and leave nothing in the logs to explain why.

Step 2: Get the compose file

curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ConductionNL/shillinq/development/shillinq-compose.yaml

One self-contained file. Nothing else to fetch, nothing to edit.

Step 3: Start it

docker compose -f shillinq-compose.yaml up -d

The first run takes a few minutes — it pulls three images, then downloads and unpacks the application archives before Nextcloud starts at all. Watch it if you like:

docker compose -f shillinq-compose.yaml logs -f app-installer

It is ready when this returns "installed":true:

curl -s http://localhost:8611/status.php

Step 4: Open it

What	Where
Shillinq	http://localhost:8611/apps/shillinq/
Admin interface	http://localhost:8611 — admin / admin

What is running, and why it is more than one app

App	Why
openregister	Required. Shillinq declares its registers and schemas against OpenRegister.
thematiq	Optional. Government theming. Absent, the UI renders unthemed rather than wrong.
integriq	Optional. The connector, for feeding in data from systems you do not control.
shillinq	The app this tutorial is about.

That OpenRegister dependency is not declared in appinfo/info.xml. No app in the fleet declares an <app> dependency, so nothing stops the App Store installing Shillinq on its own — it would then load, find no register to attach to, and show you an empty app rather than an error. The compose file encodes the dependency the manifest does not.

Step 5: Check that it actually worked

This is the step people skip, and it is the one worth doing.

A page loading is not a page working. Nextcloud serves its page shell before an app decides whether it has anything to render, so an app URL returns HTTP 200 even when it resolves to nothing at all. A smoke test that checks for a 200 would call that a success.

So check content instead:

# Registers exist. An empty list here does not mean "nothing configured yet" --
# it means the register configuration was never imported, and those two states
# look identical from the outside.
curl -s -u admin:admin "http://localhost:8611/apps/openregister/api/registers" | head -c 300

What to look at first

Shillinq ships with more than fits in one sitting. These are the parts worth opening first:

• Dutch BBV compliance for governments
• General ledger and trial balance
• Three-way matching for purchase orders
• Sales invoices and receivables
• Import supplier bills (UBL and CSV)

Pinning versions

Every app resolves to its newest release by default, pre-releases included, because most Connext apps do not yet publish a stable one. That is honest about what exists, but it is not reproducible. Pin whatever you need:

SHILLINQ_VERSION=1.2.3 \
OPENREGISTER_VERSION=1.1.6 \
DEMO_PORT=9000 \
docker compose -f shillinq-compose.yaml up -d

Removing it

# Stop, keep the data
docker compose -f shillinq-compose.yaml down

# Stop and delete everything, including the database
docker compose -f shillinq-compose.yaml down -v

Why nothing is mounted from a checkout

You may notice this file downloads release archives rather than pointing at a repository, and that no volume maps to a directory on your machine. Both are deliberate.

Nextcloud installs and updates an app by deleting the app directory and extracting a fresh archive over it. Point that at a git checkout and an app-store update will delete your working tree — measured on a development machine on 27 August 2026, where an updater fired on a container restart and removed every top-level file from a bind-mounted checkout, including its .git directory.

There is a second reason, and it is the one that bites quietly. A release archive is a complete application: it carries its vendor/ directory and its built JavaScript. A git clone carries neither — and a Nextcloud app with no vendor/ does not fail loudly. It warns once and keeps loading, so the app appears installed while every service that needs a dependency is silently missing.

To work on these apps rather than with them, use a development environment instead. This file cannot serve that purpose and does not try.

Troubleshooting

Something not behaving? Find the matching situation below.

!`app-installer` exits and the app is missing

An archive could not be downloaded — usually a pinned version with no matching release. Check the log for the URL it tried, then run up again to retry.

!It stops with `openregister missing; aborting`

Deliberate. Every Connext app declares registers against OpenRegister, so a stack without it would start and then fail in a dozen confusing ways instead of one clear one.

!The interface renders unthemed

Thematiq is not installed or not enabled. Cosmetic, and expected — the theme resolver renders unthemed rather than wrong when it is absent.

!Everything returns 404 or a maintenance page after a restart

Nextcloud is waiting for an upgrade. Run docker compose -f shillinq-compose.yaml exec -u www-data nextcloud php occ upgrade.

!The port is already in use

Set another one: DEMO_PORT=9000 docker compose -f shillinq-compose.yaml up -d. The port also has to appear in the trusted-domain list, which the compose file handles for you from the same variable.

Next step

A running app is the entry point, not the destination.

Set up the whole Connext ecosystem

The same idea, with eleven apps wired together instead of one.

Start tutorial

What Shillinq does

The feature list, in more depth than a tutorial can carry.

Read more