Sblurp

Run a community on your own server.

A $5 a month server is enough for a busy community. See How much does it cost? for what each server size holds.

Choose how to set it up

Not a developer? You can probably do this with an AI assistant, such as Claude. You make the accounts, and the assistant does the setup with you. Read Set up a server with AI.

Developer? Pick a host and follow its page.

Pick a host

Each page has the full steps, backups and updates for that host.

  • Render: no server to look after. About $7.25 a month.
  • Railway: no server to look after. About $5 to $7 a month.
  • Fly.io: no server to look after. About $4 a month.
  • Any VPS, such as DigitalOcean, Hetzner or OVHcloud, with Docker Compose. From $4 a month.
  • Docker and Compose, on any Linux machine, with Caddy for TLS.
  • Podman, with automatic updates and rollback.

You do not need to run sblurp.chat or the web client. People use the app at app.sblurp.chat and add your address.

What every setup needs

  • A domain or subdomain, such as chat.example.org.

  • A disk that survives restarts, mounted at /data. Without it, a restart deletes your community.

  • Two settings:

    SBLURP_BASE_URL=https://chat.example.org
SBLURP_TRUSTED_ISSUERS=https://sblurp.chat

SBLURP_BASE_URL is the address people use to reach your server. Sign-in tokens are made for that exact address, so it must match what the app connects to.

SBLURP_TRUSTED_ISSUERS says whose accounts your server accepts. Use sblurp.chat so anyone with a Sblurp account can join.

See Configuration for the other settings.

Become the owner

  1. Open app.sblurp.chat and sign in.
  2. Click Add a community and enter your address.
  3. Join. The first person to join becomes the owner.

Do this before you tell anyone the address.

Add bots

A bot is a JavaScript file in the plugins folder inside the data directory. Read how to make one.

Back it up

Everything lives in the data directory. See Backups for automatic backups to Cloudflare R2, or for a plain copy.

What the server sees, and what we see

Your server stores your community's messages, files and member list. sblurp.chat stores none of it. When someone joins, your server learns their account id, username, whether their email is verified, whether they declared they are over 13 and over 18, and the profile they chose to share.

Encrypted in transit. Not end-to-end encrypted: the admins of a community can read its messages, including DMs.

Tell your members this. It is the deal they are making with you.

Your community's data lives wherever you put your Sblurp server. We do not market Sblurp to the EU in particular, but we must point this out: if you put your server in the EU, all data except accounts lives there, and only there. Accounts stay on sblurp.chat in the United States. See Your data.

The code

The community server is open source under the AGPL-3.0. Read it, change it, run your fork. If you change it and offer it to others over a network, share your changes. The repository link will be here when the first release ships.

View this page as Markdown · Glossary · API schema.json · openapi.json