A lightweight, self-hosted, plugin-extensible digital signage server. Point any browser at a URL and it becomes a screen
StreetSign is a self-contained web server for running digital signage. You create and schedule posts (text, images, video, web pages, and more), organise them into feeds, and arrange those feeds into zones on configurable screen layouts.
Each physical display is just a browser — a PC, a Raspberry Pi, a smart TV, tablet, etc. pointed at a URL. The display client loads its layout and continuously polls the server for new content. Admins author and publish everything from a web control panel; the server handles scheduling, permissions, and housekeeping.
There are plenty of digital signage projects. StreetSign is built around a few deliberate choices that set it apart:
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Genuinely lightweight. SQLite is the only datastore, and static assets are served by WhiteNoise
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Nothing to install on the screens. Display clients are ordinary web browsers.
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An editorial workflow. Permissions are granted per-feed at three levels — read, write, and publish — to individual users or groups. Authoring and publishing are deliberately separate, so contributors can draft content while only trusted users push it live.
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Extensible by dropping in a folder. Both post types and external content importers are plugin systems: StreetSign auto-discovers any module under
streetsign_server/post_types/orstreetsign_server/external_source_types/. Post content is stored as JSON, so new post types need no database migration. -
Automation-friendly. A web hook post type fires HTTP requests on render, display, and hide. RSS/Atom feeds and local image folders can be auto-imported on a schedule.
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Free, self-hosted, GPLv3. Your content and database stay on your hardware.
StreetSign grew out of running signage for large conferences, and it's well suited to anywhere you need flexible, multi-screen displays under your own control:
- Conferences & events — different layouts per hall or stage, switched per display via client aliases; scheduled session info and announcements.
- Churches & community spaces — rotating notices, event listings, and RSS-imported news.
- Offices & lobbies — dashboards, welcome messages, embedded web pages.
- Schools & campuses — timetables, alerts, and per-department feeds.
- Retail & hospitality — menu boards, promotions, looping video.
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Plain Text | Unformatted text, auto-scaled to fill the zone |
| Rich Text | Formatted content via WYSIWYG editor |
| Image | Uploaded images |
| Video | HTML5 video with loop — muted autoplay by default |
| External Web Page | Embeds any URL in a full-zone iframe |
| Web hook | POSTs to external URLs on render, display, and hide — for controlling stream players (e.g. VLC) or automation systems |
| Raw HTML | Arbitrary, unsanitised HTML rendered in a sandboxed iframe |
| Weather | Live current conditions and 2-day forecast from wttr.in, with responsive signage-focused layouts |
New post types can be added via the plugin system (streetsign_server/post_types/).
- Post lifetime — start/end dates and times, or mark a post "Show permanently" (never expires, never rotates)
- Time-of-day restrictions — blackout windows or exclusive windows (e.g. "only show between 09:00 and 17:00")
- Day-of-week recurrence — limit a post to specific weekdays (e.g. "only show on Mondays and Wednesdays") within its lifetime
- Display duration — how many seconds each post stays visible (2–100s)
- Per-post font size — override the automatic zone font scaling
- Playlist ordering — admins can reorder posts within a feed via up/down controls; posts cycle in sort order on display clients
Three permission levels per feed, assignable to users and groups:
- Read — view posts in the feed
- Write — create and edit posts
- Publish — mark posts ready for display (separate from write — the dashboard highlights unpublished posts)
StreetSign is a single web server. Browsers acting as display clients load a screen layout, then continuously poll for posts from the feeds assigned to each zone.
Each screen layout is a set of rectangular zones positioned on a background. Each zone subscribes to one or more feeds and cycles through their posts, using either a fade (opacity cross-fade) or scroll (horizontal slide) transition. Zones can be styled per-layout with custom CSS, background images, user-uploaded fonts, and per-zone font and colour overrides.
Client aliases map a short access key (like /client/mainhall) to a
specific screen + engine combination with display overrides (aspect ratio,
fade time, scroll speed). Different physical displays can use different layouts
without ever changing the bookmark on the client.
git clone https://github.com/jamswat/streetsign.git
cd streetsign
./setup.sh
./run.pyOpen http://localhost:5000 — default login is admin / admin.
A fresh database is seeded with three demo accounts (password = login name):
admin (full admin), editor (write/publish on all feeds via the editors
group), and viewer (read-only).
Please change these logins before deploying!
A Docker image is built and published to GitHub Container Registry on every tagged release.
docker run -d --name streetsign -p 5000:5000 ghcr.io/jamswat/streetsign:latestOpen http://localhost:5000 — default login is admin / admin.
docker compose up -dThe compose file pulls ghcr.io/jamswat/streetsign:latest
This brings up a single app service on ${WEB_PORT:-5000}. Two named volumes
are created automatically and persist across rebuilds:
| Volume | Mount path | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
db_data |
/data |
SQLite database |
uploads |
/app/streetsign_server/static/user_files |
User-uploaded images, fonts, etc. |
You may wish to set up bind mounts for these instead, or also configure for external image folders.
| Variable | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
SECRET_KEY |
dev-default-key-change-in-production |
Flask session-signing key. Change this before deploying. Generate one with python3 -c "import uuid; print(uuid.uuid4())" and pass via -e SECRET_KEY=... or a .env file. |
WEB_PORT |
5000 |
Host port to publish (compose only) |
PORT |
5000 |
Port the server listens on inside the container |
HOST |
0.0.0.0 |
Bind address inside the container |
DATABASE_FILE |
/data/database.db |
SQLite path (already volume-mounted in image) |
LOG_LEVEL |
INFO |
Logging level: DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR |
WAITRESS_THREADS |
8 |
Number of Waitress worker threads |
WAITRESS_CHANNEL_TIMEOUT |
30 |
Seconds before an idle client connection is dropped |
StreetSign loads config.py if present, falling back to the defaults in
config_default.py. Don't edit config_default.py; instead copy the values
you want to change into config.py. Common environment variables
(SECRET_KEY, DATABASE_FILE, PORT, HOST) are honoured directly.
- Back up
database.dbandconfig.py(see Backup & Restore below) git pullmake migrate- Restart the server
A naïve cp database.db can produce a corrupt copy because SQLite in WAL mode
also writes to database.db-wal. Use the built-in backup script, which uses
the SQLite online backup API to produce a consistent snapshot while the server
keeps running:
make backup
# or explicitly:
.venv/bin/python scripts/backup_db.py /path/to/backup.dbIn Docker, mount a backup volume and run it from cron:
docker exec streetsign python scripts/backup_db.py /backups/streetsign-$(date +%F).dbTo restore, stop the server, replace database.db with the backup file, and
restart.
- Python 3.10+
- ImageMagick (for image resizing and thumbnails)
Debian/Ubuntu:
apt-get install python3-dev python3-pip imagemagickThe setup.sh script (which runs make all) creates a .venv with all
Python dependencies. To use the virtualenv directly: .venv/bin/python.
Full documentation (WIP) can be found at https://jamswat.github.io/streetsign/.
StreetSign was originally written by Daniel Fairhead for Teenstreet 2013 in Germany (released under GPLv3), and used at large conferences and in corporate environments since. It was further developed by Daniel Lang (2020–2024). Both upstream projects now appear to be abandoned; this is a maintained fork that continues their work.
Code in this repository has been developed with assistance from AI coding tools.