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
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.
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 | shonce 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.comIf 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.
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 | 4.4 | 5.0 | 3.9 | 6.5 | 10.3 | 22.9 | 29.8 | 94.8 |
KLOC counts backend application code only; excludes frontend, templates, 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.
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.
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.