Introduction

Compose is an open-source platform that makes it dramatically faster for developers to build and share internal apps with their team. It's an excellent way to build internal support dashboards, ops tools, admin panels, and other user-facing web apps that rely on your backend data and logic.

What is Compose?

The platform has two parts:

• Build user-facing internal web apps with just backend code using our SDKs for Python and TypeScript.
• Use and share those apps via your team's Compose web dashboard.

Here's a simple dashboard that displays a table of users from your database:

TypeScript / JavaScript

In your codebase:

import { Compose } from "@composehq/sdk";
import { database } from "../database";

const viewUsersApp = new Compose.App({
    route: "view-users",
    handler: async ({ page, ui }) => {
        const users = await database.selectUsers() // query your database
        page.add(() => ui.table("users-table", users)); // display results in a table
    }
})

Python

In your codebase:

import compose_sdk as c
from database import database

def view_users_handler(page: c.Page, ui: c.UI):
    users = database.select_users() # query your database
    page.add(lambda: ui.table("users-table", users)) # display results in a table

view_users_app = c.App(route="view-users", handler=view_users_handler)

In your team's Compose web dashboard:

The Compose SDK includes tables, forms, charts, and 40+ other professional-grade components to quickly build apps. Since the SDK is installed into your backend, connecting these components to your own data and logic is as easy as importing functions and calling them within the Compose Apps that you define.

The Compose web dashboard renders beautiful, responsive UIs for your apps and enables you to share them with your entire team. It also bundles audit logs, RBAC, and other useful features to manage your tools without any configuration on your end.

When you're ready, Compose scales to support complex, reactive, multi-page internal apps. Existing users have built internal apps to label thousands of PDFs, manage live events, run AI inference on their data, and more.

Installation

Add to existing project

The easiest way to use Compose is by installing it as a dependency in your server-side application. That way, your Compose Apps live alongside your existing code - letting you share models, utilities, and logic just by importing them.

Node.js guides

Node.js

Express

Fastify

Hono

Koa

Python guides

Python

Django

FastAPI

Flask

note

Don't see your framework? You can still use the general Node.js or Python installation guides. The setup is virtually the same for all frameworks.

Create a new project

If you're just exploring for now or prefer to start from scratch, you can also create a new project with the SDK and some starter apps.

Create a new Node.js project

Create a new Python project