Taguette (v1.4.1) on the Linux desktop

16th February 2024 by Genevieve Clifford

I’m a long time user of Taguette¹ (missing reference) (free + open source software for computer-assisted qualitative data analysis), using both the “desktop” and self-hosted versions. I find NVivo to have far more functionality than I actually need, and I have a general distaste for proprietary software, making Taguette ideal! During my master’s project, I needed to install Taguette on a Linux machine (my laptop running Manjaro) and found the documentation to do so less than ideal. I ended up using Docker, and I replicate the instructions here in case they are of use to anybody! This is a paraphrased version of the instructions I originally had in the appendices of my master’s dissertation.

Prerequisites

• Install Docker and add yourself to the docker user group (as per these instructions)
• Create a directory to house your Taguette files
  • I did this in ~/.taguette, but somewhere like ~/.local/share/taguette would also work fine
  • I’ll refer to this directory as $TAGUETTE_DIR throughout these instructions, replace as necessary

Docker setup

Create a Docker Compose file in $TAGUETTE_DIR with the following:

version: "2.4"
services:
  taguette: 
    image: quay.io/remram44/taguette
    ports: ["127.0.0.1:7465:7465"]
    volumes: 
      - "./data:/data"

You may need to manually create the data directory within $TAGUETTE_HOME. Run docker-compose up to check everything works as expected.

Desktop file

To not have to cd into $TAGUETTE_DIR and run docker-compose up every time you want to run Taguette, you can create a desktop file. Create taguette.desktop in $TAGUETTE_DIR and insert the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=Taguette
Comment=Free and open-source qualitative research tool
Path=$TAGUETTE_DIR
Exec=$SHELL -c 'docker-compose up'
Terminal=true
Icon=$TAGUETTE_DIR/icon.png

You can then grab an icon for Taguette from the website (or elsewhere) and place this in $TAGUETTE_DIR (I have presumed above that you’ve saved this as “icon.png”, rename as you wish in the desktop file). Now all that’s left to do is symlink this desktop file into ~/.local/share/applications (i.e., by running ln -s $TAGUETTE_DIR/taguette.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/taguette.desktop) and restart your session (log in and out again). Try launching Taguette in the same way you ordinarily launch programs on your desktop, and a terminal window should open. Ctrl-click the link that appears, and you should be in business!

User styles

Additionally, while not related to running Taguette on Linux specifically, I have the following user tweaks set up in Stylus to fix some UI annoyances I have with Taguette. These are (in order): not being able to scroll the highlight/document list independently (based on Vicky’s suggested fix in #189 but not merged into a release version), a lack of transparency in highlights, and a dislike of the font used throughout.

/* ==UserStyle==
@name           Taguette
@namespace      github.com/openstyles/stylus
@version        1.0.0
@description    A new userstyle
@author         Genevieve Clifford
==/UserStyle== */

@-moz-document url-prefix('http://localhost:7465/') {
   .sticky-top {
    overflow-y: auto;
    height: 100vh;
    }
    
    .highlight {
        background-color: rgba(18, 83, 104, 0.2) !important;
    }
    
    body {
        font-family: 'Cantarell' !important;
        font-weight: 300 !important;
    } 
}

Footnotes

References