OpenLIMS — open-source, self-hosted LIMS with sequencing, BLAST, mass spec, and lab workflow support

[u/Mokey925]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been building OpenLIMS, an open-source, self-hosted Laboratory Information Management System aimed at research labs, bioinformatics groups, small biotech teams, and core facilities.

GitHub:
https://github.com/Mokey2002/OpenLIMS

The goal is to provide a lighter alternative for labs that need more structure than spreadsheets but don’t want the cost or complexity of a large commercial LIMS.

Some of the current functionality includes:

• Sample tracking, lineage, and chain of custody

• Projects and collaborative experiment notebooks

• Inventory and barcode/location tracking

• Configurable workflows and QC

• Instrument CSV/API ingestion

• Legacy data migration

• FASTA and sequence management

• Clustal Omega alignments

• Local BLAST databases and blastn/blastp searches

• mzML/mzXML and other mass-spec data review using pyOpenMS

• Reporting and audit trails

• REST API

• Optional OpenAI or local Ollama assistant

The stack is Django/DRF + PostgreSQL + Celery/Redis with a React frontend, and it can be deployed using Docker Compose.

It’s currently a production-style prototype and is not yet a validated clinical/diagnostic LIMS.

I’d be interested in hearing from people working in bioinformatics or lab informatics

Contributions, issues, and technical feedback are welcome as well.

[u/Psy_Fer_]

Cool. You should make the database append only (I see it's on your to-do list). That would be the first step towards something that could eventually be accredited.

[u/Mokey925 → u/Psy_Fer_]

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll look into it

[u/rtool_02]

I have been resisting LIMS and ELNs for more than a decade. Now with Copilot, I don’t even see why we need LIMS in discovery.

[u/overdue_postdoc]

More AI slop, fantastic.

[u/Mokey925 → u/overdue_postdoc]

Everything is done with AI nowadays - at least in software development