Chatto Self-Hosting Documentation

Key Features

• A fully-featured chat experience: all the features you’ve come to love (or not) from other chat apps, but without the bloat. Yes, including file sharing, video embeds, and voice/video calls with screen sharing!
• It’s just a single binary: start simple by throwing the executable on your favorite server — no separate database required. or scale out with Docker Compose, Kubernetes, or your company’s weird homegrown deployment system.
• Flexible permissions and roles: server operators get fine-grained control over who can do what and where. Keep your server simple with just a few channels, or go full monty with hundreds of rooms sorted into room groups, each acting as a permission boundary.
• It’s crazy fast: both the backend and the frontend are compact, light on resource usage, and optimized for snappy performance. No, seriously. We really did go hard on performance. Maybe a little too hard.
• Focus on data protection and privacy: Chatto encrypts message text and selected durable account fields with per-user keys, supports crypto-shredding during account deletion, and documents the fields and assets outside that encryption boundary.

Get Started

Introduction What Chatto is, what it is not, and what to expect today.

Quick Start Get Chatto running in a few minutes.

Building Your Community Structure Plan room groups, universal rooms, permissions, roles, and server branding before inviting members.

Server Operations Use the admin dashboard, event log, metrics, exporter, backups, and operator CLI for day-to-day operations.

Notifications & Web Push Configure persistent notifications, Web Push, VAPID keys, DND behavior, and device expectations.

Media & Attachments Understand uploads, image transforms, room files, link previews, S3 storage, and video processing.

Docker Compose Deploy with Docker Compose for production.

Standalone Binary Run Chatto as a single executable.

Kubernetes Current status and requirements for Kubernetes deployments.