OrangeHRM Starter: an open source HR system for self-hosting

What the starter edition is

OrangeHRM is described as a comprehensive Human Resource Management system that captures all the essential functionalities required for any enterprise, and the repository is the Starter Application. The name matters for what you are adopting. The README is explicit that OrangeHRM is free software you can redistribute and modify under the GNU General Public License version 3, either version 3 of the License or, at your option, any later version, with the copyright held by OrangeHRM Inc. since 2006. So what you get here is the community tier of a product that also has commercial tiers, and the parts of an HR suite that are genuinely shared across tiers are the ones here. The topics list gives the functional range, with leave-management called out specifically alongside hr, human-resources-management-system, enterprise and mysql, and restful-api as an interface. The primary language is PHP, the licence is GPL-3.0, the last push was on 2026-06-28, and the releases are v5.9 on 2026-06-28, v5.8.1 on 2026-04-06 and v5.8 on 2025-11-21.

Installing it, and the web installer

There are three ways in, and the documentation routes each of them. First you download the latest version of OrangeHRM Starter from the SourceForge files page. Then you set up the environment, with separate prerequisite pages for installing on Linux and installing on Windows. Then you install using the web installer, with a Starter Installation Guide and a Starter Upgrade Guide for the 5.x versions. The order matters, because the web installer is a web installer and not a self-contained binary, so it needs a working PHP and web server environment underneath it before it can do anything. That is why the prerequisites pages come before the installation guide rather than being folded into it. For further information on how to use the product, the README points at the User Guides, the tutorial videos and the FAQs on the Help Portal, which is a separate site from the code.

The Docker image, and what it assembles

The Dockerfile is the most informative file in the repository because it states exactly what the application needs. The base is `php:8.3-apache-bookworm`, with the production php.ini moved into place, and two environment variables record the version and the checksum of the artefact, `OHRM_VERSION 5.9` and `OHRM_MD5 380d85deba0f82174a7db346c9347b87`. The image downloads the release zip from SourceForge, verifies it against that MD5 with `md5sum -c -`, unpacks it and moves the directory into place as the document root, then fixes ownership so that the writable directories, `html/lib/confs`, `html/src/cache`, `html/src/log` and `html/src/config`, belong to www-data. The PHP extensions compiled in are gd, opcache, intl, pdo_mysql, zip and ldap, with gd configured for freetype and jpeg and ldap pointed at the platform's own library directory. The system packages installed for the build are the matching development headers, libfreetype6-dev, libjpeg-dev, libpng-dev, libzip-dev, libldap2-dev and libicu-dev, plus unzip.

Why the extension list is the real prerequisite list

The extension list is worth isolating, because it defines what a host has to provide. pdo_mysql is the database driver, so a MySQL or MariaDB server is the datastore. gd with freetype and jpeg is what handles image processing, which in an HR system means photographs of staff and generated documents. intl is the internationalisation extension, and for a product sold in multiple markets it is not optional. ldap is there for directory integration, so a company that authenticates against Active Directory or OpenLDAP can use it. zip is for the archive handling. And opcache is configured with explicit values in the same Dockerfile, `opcache.memory_consumption=128` and `opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8`, which tells you the project has thought about the memory profile of a long-running PHP process serving a large organisation. A deployment that installs PHP without these extensions will reach the installer and then fail, and the failure will look like a blank page rather than a missing dependency.

The mobile apps, the demo and the other resources

OrangeHRM ships a mobile app alongside the web application, with a Google Play listing and an App Store listing both under the OrangeHRM name, and the open source Android package identifier visible in the Play link. That is a meaningful detail for adoption, because an HR system is used on a phone, in a meeting, in a corridor, and a system that only works on a desktop is a system people do not use. There is also a live demo at the opensource-demo hostname, which is the fastest way to see the interface and decide whether the feature set is close enough to what you need before you install anything. The Releases are on SourceForge, the commercial product has its own site, and support requests go through the Help Portal or the os support email address, so the support boundary between the community edition and the paid one is clear.

The repository layout, and what is not here

The top level of the tree is a PHP application with the usual parts and a few that are worth naming. There is `src/` for the application source, `web/` for the front end, `lib/` for the shared libraries, `installer/` for the web installer, `build/` for the build scripts, `bin/` for the console entry point, and `devTools/` for development tooling. There is an `index.php` at the root and a `.htaccess` beside it, so the front controller pattern is used with the Apache rewrite rules in the repository. A `phpunit.xml` is present for the test suite, and a `.php-cs-fixer.dist.php` for code style, which is the standard PHP toolchain. The `CHANGELOG.TXT` is an all-caps file name, a small sign of the project age, and there are `SECURITY.md` and `CLAUDE.md` files alongside the `AGENTS.md` and the `.agents/` directory, which is the newest addition and the one that tells you the project is modernising its contributor workflow.

The agent guidance, and what it signals

The most recent thing in the README is a section on using AI coding agents, and it is a short one with a large implication. The repository ships guidance for AI coding agents under `.agents/`, with `AGENTS.md` as the entry point, and the instruction is to open the repo in your coding agent and just say Hi, which is said to check what is set up and walk you through the rest. If that does not kick things off, the fallback prompt is given explicitly, asking the agent to follow `.agents/SETUP.md` to set itself up for the project. The `CLAUDE.md` file at the root sits alongside it, so the same guidance is exposed in two conventions. For an evaluation, the point is not the tooling but the direction. A project with a long-lived PHP codebase and a GPL licence is making it easier for an agent to contribute, which is how a large legacy codebase gets maintained when the original maintainers are not around to onboard people by hand.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt OrangeHRM Starter if you want an HR system you run yourself and the core HR functions are enough, since the application, the installer and the Docker image are all published. Skip it if you need the advanced modules of the commercial tiers, because this is the starter edition. Before deploying, read the Linux and Windows prerequisites pages, since the web installer expects a prepared environment, and check the PHP extensions the container enables, which are gd, opcache, intl, pdo_mysql, zip and ldap, so a bare PHP host without them will fail at a point that is hard to diagnose from the browser.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. orangehrm/orangehrm on GitHub
4. README
5. Releases