TopGit tracks basecamp/once-campfire on GitHub. The project has 4.8k stars. Super simple group chat, without a subscription
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Campfire is a web-based chat application. It supports many of the features you'd
expect, including:
Multiple rooms, with access controls
Direct messages
File attachments with previews
Search
Notifications (via Web Push)
@mentions
API, with support for bot integrations
Running your own Campfire instance
Campfire's Docker image contains everything needed for a fully-functional,
single-machine deployment. This includes the web app, background jobs, caching,
file serving, and SSL. You can use our pre-built image at
ghcr.io/basecamp/once-campfire:latest, or build your own from this repo.
Deploying with ONCE
The easiest way to self-host Campfire is with ONCE.
It will guide you through the initial set up and then keep your instance up to date automatically.
If you don't already have once installed, run this on the machine you want to run Campfire on:
curl https://get.once.com | sh
once will launch as soon as the install is finished.
Choose Campfire from the list of applications, follow the instructions, and ONCE will take care of the rest.
If you prefer the command line to the dashboard, you can deploy directly:
once deploy ghcr.io/basecamp/once-campfire --host chat.example.com
Deploying with Docker
If you'd rather run the Docker image yourself, you can read more about that in the self-hosting guide.
[!TIP]
When you start Campfire for the first time, you'll be guided through a wizard to create an admin account.
The email address that you enter for the admin account will be visible on the sign-in page, it's there so
that people have someone to contact if they need help with their account. If that bothers you, put in any
email address you want and create yourself a new admin account.
Authenticated room, message, sidebar and search pages use a bounded 64 MiB cache per worker.
Set CAMPFIRE_RESPONSE_CACHE_MB=0 to disable it. Every request still checks authentication
and room access; commits from any SQLite writer invalidate complete cached HTML and gzip bodies.
Native HTML, JSON and stream fragments have a separate 64 MiB memory limit per worker;
shared rate limits retain their existing store.
Other implementations
Campfire also has implementations in Django, Laravel, Express, Elixir, Go, Rust and C:
HTTP workload (requests/sec)
Rails
Django
Laravel
Express
Elixir
Go
Rust
C
Room page
4,101
1,507
3,872
42,636
5,350
53,060
106,494
137,524
Messages page
4,115
1,596
3,995
74,362
5,712
54,800
102,697
144,642
Sidebar
4,333
1,873
4,493
94,329
5,949
59,144
120,294
152,002
Search
4,282
1,862
4,172
84,665
5,848
60,509
121,378
149,487
Post a message
330
262
794
2,155
1,278
9,021
8,037
7,530
Backend KLOC
5.5
5.3
4.1
6.8
11.6
23.2
30.7
94.8
KLOC counts backend code plus executable code in templates; excludes plain HTML, frontend, tests, dependencies and generated files.
Shared verification · Detailed results.
Measured with 16 concurrent clients on an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 with 32 GB RAM,
with four hardware cores allocated to each app.
Development
You are welcome - and encouraged - to modify Campfire to your liking.
Please see our development guide for how to get Campfire set up for local development.
Security
See SECURITY.md for how to report a vulnerability and a description of our trust model.
Browser writes use Rails’ Sec-Fetch-Site header-only protection and Origin check.
HTTPS requires browser metadata; plain HTTP retains the missing-header fallback.
Forms contain no CSRF tokens. Existing cookies, bot APIs and signed uploads remain compatible.
Yes — basecamp/once-campfire ships under the MIT license, which makes its source code freely readable (and, depending on license terms, forkable and reusable). Source: github.com/basecamp/once-campfire.
What is basecamp/once-campfire?
basecamp/once-campfire (basecamp/once-campfire) is a Ruby project on GitHub. From the project's own README: Super simple group chat, without a subscription
Where do I read more about basecamp/once-campfire?
This TopGit page is a snapshot — the READ ME tab shows the project's own README content (links stripped, images preserved). The GitHub repository at github.com/basecamp/once-campfire is the definitive source.
Read full README in the tab above.
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