The Journey of Lesli

Lesli as a concept was born back in 2014.

The first version of Lesli started as a private WordPress plugin, created to provide simple administration software for companies whose only software was a website running on shared hosting with PHP 5 and MySQL.

Over time, Lesli kept growing in features and eventually evolved into a standalone software product. It was rebuilt on top of Slim PHP for the backend, Mustache for rendering, and an early version of Vue.js for the web application. The goal was not only to make it more robust, but also to keep it compatible with shared hosting providers, so customers did not have to worry about complex servers just to run the software they needed for their small businesses.

Then, in 2018, I made my first serious attempt to migrate the base code into something that could better support custom requirements from customers who were ready to pay for them as real projects, not just through a small monthly subscription.

That led to another major rewrite: Node.js for a new modular backend, MongoDB for the database, and Vue.js for the frontend.

Just one year later, in 2019, I was introduced to Ruby on Rails.

As you can probably guess by now, I fell in love with it very quickly.

So I made a decision that was both exciting and painful: I dropped a lot of previous work and started migrating the core of Lesli again, this time to Rails 5. Only a few months later, I already had a fully working version of Lesli running on Rails.

At that point, Lesli was still private software.

Also in 2019, I started working with an investor from the other side of the ocean. The idea was to turn Lesli into a product that would be easy to distribute, install, maintain, and secure enough to support the operations of larger companies — a kind of federated software that could work across multiple companies.

That stage did not go as well as I expected.

But it was still important, because during that process I was able to design the first real version of Lesli as a framework.

After five years leading large groups of developers and working to accomplish the vision of that stage, I decided to step away and continue building Lesli on my own.

Then, in 2024, I decided to go back to my roots and release Lesli as open source software under the GPLv3.

My hope is to build something truly useful for others — something that can help people grow their businesses with software that is solid, well-designed, and built to last.

And that is why releasing Lesli as open source means so much to me. It is not the beginning of the story. It is the result of more than a decade of work, changes, mistakes, and persistence.

— Luis Donis