Expostfacto is a modernized fork of VMware's Postfacto, fully rewritten with Rails 8 and Hotwire. It helps teams run great retrospectives remotely.
Name Credit: The name "Expostfacto" was suggested by @flavorjones - a clever play on "ex post facto" meaning "from a thing done afterward."
Postfacto lets you run an agile retrospective even when your team is distributed across the world. Your retros will live update across all your devices so each participant can follow along on their device.
Easily set up Postfacto to work with Google OAuth so users can sign up with their Google accounts. Alternatively, you can control access to your instance with the admin dashboard.
You can create private retro boards for your team that are password protected or choose to leave them public so that anyone you give the link to can access them.
Participants can add and vote on items from their mobile devices, so it is easy to run a retro without everyone in the group having a laptop nearby. This works well for retros where some people are in the room and some are remote.
Retros are designed to help teams improve and that's hard to do without taking action. Postfacto tracks your team's actions to help you keep on top of them.
This fork completely modernizes the original Postfacto codebase:
- Rails 8 - Single-stack architecture with no separate frontend build
- Hotwire - Turbo + Stimulus for modern, fast interactions (replaced React/Redux)
- Tailwind CSS v4 - Modern utility-first styling
- PostgreSQL - Production-ready database
- Ruby 3.3 - Latest stable Ruby
- Simplified Deployment - Single Docker image, no frontend build step
# Install dependencies
./deps.sh
# Run the application
./run.sh
# App available at http://localhost:4000Expostfacto is designed for easy self-hosting on modern platforms:
- Render (recommended) - Deploy with
render.yamlconfiguration - Includes CI/CD via GitHub Actions
- PostgreSQL database included
- Free tier available
For deployment instructions and configuration, see the render.yaml file in the repository.
See the Contributing Guide for more info.
This project is a fork of vmware-archive/postfacto, originally created by Pivotal Labs and later maintained by VMware. We're grateful to the original authors and contributors for creating such a valuable tool for agile teams.
Special thanks to @flavorjones for suggesting the name "Expostfacto"!
Expostfacto is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (often referred to as AGPL-3.0). The full text of the license is available here. It's important to note that this license allows you to deploy an instance of Expostfacto for private, public or internal use.