Administering Emissary

Emissary is designed to be easy to install and configure on a wide range of servers. Each instance can host one domain (website) or many, and can run as a single server or in a cluster. Similarly, domains can be home to a single user’s blog and social posts, or a large community of users. These factors (and more) are determined by the system administrators who control the server cluster.

Trustworthy Web Apps

Emissary aims to be a trustworthy platform in all ways. For system administrators, you can trust that Emissary installations will behave as you expect them to, and will not be used for malicious purposes. Here’s how:

  1. Administrators control which themes, templates, and widgets are installed on your hardware. No rogue plugins or add-ons like other open source packages.

  2. The packages that ARE installed are limited in their specific functionality. The custom workflow steps used to build Emissary’s templates provide all of the features designers need to create rich web applications, but they don’t let malicious designers create rogue systems.

  3. Social interactions (such as email and ActivityPub features) are strictly controlled by the core Emissary system. They cannot be abused by rogue templates either.