Awesome FOSS Production Apps

A curated, community-maintained directory of production-grade Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) applications, organized by category, aimed at developers who want to study real-world, non-trivial applications.

Overview

• Type: Themed directory / curated list
• Focus: Free and Open Source Software suitable for production use
• Audience: Developers looking to analyze and learn from high-quality, real-world app codebases
• Source: GitHub – DataDaoDe/awesome-foss-apps

The list is inspired by Sindre Sorhus’s awesome ecosystem.

Features

General Features

• Curated list of production-grade FOSS applications
• Applications are organized by category (e.g., web apps frontend-only, fullstack, etc.)
• Emphasis on non-trivial, quality applications suitable for:
  • Studying real-world architectures
  • Learning framework and language best practices
  • Understanding testing, routing, and deployment patterns
• Focus on projects that are actively used or usable in production environments

Example Categories & Entries

Web Apps (Frontend Only)

• Codesandbox

  • Online IDE for web developers
  • Enables quick prototyping and implementation of frontend applications
  • Supports modern JavaScript frameworks:
    • Vue
    • Preact
    • React
    • Vanilla JavaScript

• CircleCI (Frontend)

  • Frontend for a continuous integration and deployment platform
  • Large application built with ClojureScript and immutable data structures
  • Integrations:
    • Pusher
    • Intercom
    • D3
    • Google Analytics
  • Demonstrates:
    • Navigation routing in a complex frontend
    • Communication via real-time events and websockets
    • Interaction with backend API servers
  • Includes examples of testing ClojureScript/Om apps using Karma (test suite present but not extensive)

• Precursor App

  • Highly interactive prototyping web app
  • Frontend built entirely with ClojureScript
  • Demonstrates:
    • A simple, understandable routing and event-passing system
    • Component-based frontend architecture
    • Integration with HTML5 canvas and HTML5 APIs for interactive graphics

• The Guardian (Frontend)

  • News site frontend with:
    • Subscriptions
    • Sign-in
    • Search
    • Admin interface
  • Architecture includes a series of Scala middleman apps for communication between static frontends and backend APIs
  • Highlights:
    • High-performance, optimized large-scale news site
    • Comprehensive test suite
    • Examples of speed optimization for large, traditional websites

Web Apps (Fullstack)

• Ghost
  • Simple publishing platform for bloggers
  • Codebase includes:
    • Ember.js client (frontend)
    • Node.js backend
  • Represents a fullstack application structure suitable for studying end-to-end web app design

Pricing

• The directory itself is free to access.
• Listed applications are Free and Open Source Software; licensing and usage terms vary per project and should be checked in each project’s repository.

Tags

• free-software
• apps
• production