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:

   make demo

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

2. Open 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• processed images, a website, tags, playlists, and Layouts, including unpublished drafts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:

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:

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:

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 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.