# Run a demo installation

Demo Mode starts a complete Tilecast installation that's already full of realistic sample data: a school district with buildings, screens in every status, playlists, Layouts, schedules, and players that stay online. Studio opens signed in, so you can explore, test a change, or take screenshots without setting anything up.

Everything in a demo is real Tilecast: the same server, Studio, database schema, and API you'd deploy. Only the data and the players are simulated.

**Caution:** Demo Mode signs in everyone who opens it as the Owner, and a reset deletes all
  of its data. Use it only on your own computer or in CI, never for an
  installation that holds real content.

## Start the demo

You need Docker. From the repository root:

1. Build and start the demo:

   ```sh title="Repository root · Start Demo Mode"
   make demo
   ```

   The first run builds the server image, so it takes a few minutes.

2. Open [http://localhost:18080](http://localhost:18080).

   Studio opens as the demo Owner, Dana Whitfield. A **Demo mode** banner stays at the top of every page.

To use a different port, set `TILECAST_DEMO_PORT`, for example `TILECAST_DEMO_PORT=19000 make demo`.

## What's in the demo

The default `kitchen-sink` dataset is a district with a high school, a middle school, a main office, and an athletic complex. It includes:

- 13 screens, showing every status Studio computes: online, recent, stale, offline, and disabled
- Fire TV, Android TV, and Linux players on different Player versions, in 1080p, 4K, and portrait
- display groups, a screen with no content, and a player waiting for pairing approval
- processed images, a website, tags, playlists, and Layouts, including unpublished drafts
- schedules, a draft campaign, Countdown Bar and Brand Bug plugins, and four user accounts

A smaller `basic` dataset has four screens and two playlists.

Seven screens have simulated players that stay connected. They react like real players: assign new content and the screen picks it up, or send **Identify** and the command completes. Stale and offline screens age from the moment the demo starts, so reset the demo to bring them back.

## Reset or stop the demo

Anything you change in Studio is kept until you reset:

```sh title="Reset the demo"
make demo-reset
```

A reset restores the same records with the same IDs. To switch datasets, run `make demo-reset SCENARIO=basic`.

When you're done, stop the demo and delete its data:

```sh title="Stop and remove the demo"
make demo-down
```

The demo uses its own Docker project and volumes, so it never touches an installation you run with the regular Compose file.

## Run the browser tests

The Playwright smoke tests run against a running demo, with no mocked responses:

```sh title="Run the browser smoke tests"
npx playwright install chromium
make demo
npm run test:e2e
```

Each test resets the demo first, and the suite refuses to run against a server that isn't in Demo Mode. When a test fails, Playwright saves a trace and a screenshot in `e2e/test-results`.

## Learn more

The [Demo Mode reference](https://github.com/gbyo/tilecast/blob/main/docs/demo-mode.md) covers the reset API, the stable record IDs, how the simulated players work, the configuration variables, and the safety checks that keep Demo Mode off real installations.