A free, modern, versatile, secure electronic lab notebook for researchers

eLabFTW is an electronic lab notebook manager for research teams.

It lets you store and organize your research experiments easily. It also features a database where any kind of objects (such as antibodies, plasmids, cell lines, boxes, etc.) can be stored. It is accessed via the browser. Several research teams can be hosted on the same installation. This means eLabFTW can be installed at the institute level and host all team members at the same place. This is what is done at Institut Curie and in several other research centers around the globe.

Click the image below to see it in bigger size:

eLabFTW is designed to be installed on a server, and people from the team can log in from their browser.

Without a server, even an old computer with 1 GB of RAM and an old CPU can be used. Make sure to install a recent GNU/Linux distribution on it and plug it to the intranet.

eLabFTW can easily be installed on any GNU/Linux server. It requires at least 512 MB of RAM (1 GB recommended) and 300 MB of disk space. Installation is done through Docker, so Docker needs to be installed on the server. Since it runs in a Docker container, php, webservers or mysql do not have to be installed on your server. Everything is provided by the containers so different versions and extensions do not matter. This makes upgrading versions much easier.

The documentation explains everything:

eLabFTW is a collaborative project. Your contributions are very welcome! Have a look at the contributing page to see how you can help with translation or code.

If you have found a security issue, please report it by email to the address associated to my GPG key:

gpg --search-keys "Nicolas CARPi"

Free support is available through GitHub issues. Please open an issue if you have a problem, want to make a suggestion, ask a question or discuss a feature.

You can also join the chat room on Gitter.

PRO support and professional hosting are available from Deltablot.

Subscribe to the newsletter to be notified when a new release is out!

Or use GitHub to follow releases:

As you know, eLabFTW is distributed without charge.

If you find this project useful, please consider making a small donation either:

• as a GitHub Sponsor

• or with Liberapay

This project is backed by Institut Curie and Deltablot.

Thank you for using eLabFTW. I hope it will bring happiness to your lab ;)

• elabftw/elabapi-python: python library for interacting with APIv2
• elabftw/elabapy: python library for interacting with APIv1
• elabftw/elabapi-javascript-example: example code for interacting with APIv2 through JavaScript

• The ELN Consortium: a consortium of ELN vendors interested in improving interoperability between ELNs

These projects were created by users of eLabFTW, check them out if interested!

• din14970/elabftwqrprint: python library to print QR codes from database objects
• shabihsherjeel/nionswift_elabftw_plugin: python plugin for Nionswift
• iam-cms/elabapy-cli: command line interface for eLabFTW API
• Elab::Client: perl module for eLab API by Andreas K. Hüttel
• LabView client: LabView client library by @plasmapper
• Matlab client: Matlab package to facilitate working with eLabFTW API