A chat platform for communities: servers with channels and roles, direct messages and group chats, and WebRTC voice, video and screen sharing. It is built to run on Cloudflare’s free plan with no paid dependencies.
Status: pre-release (0.1.0). The backend has an automated integration test (396 assertions, plus 49 for sign-in and 49 for the safety filters, run against a local wrangler dev), plus Node tests for the markdown parser, push encryption, image codecs and the peer-to-peer engine. The browser client is written but has not been exercised in a real browser, and a free-plan deployment is running at https://parley.heavengtwashere.workers.dev, but new screens are checked by static tests only until someone looks at them. See docs/FEATURES.md for an item-by-item account of what exists, what was verified and what is missing.
| Part | Service |
|---|---|
| API and static client | Cloudflare Workers with static assets |
| Data | D1 (SQLite), or Turso (optional) |
| Realtime (messages, typing, presence, voice signaling) | One Durable Object class using the WebSocket Hibernation API |
| Attachments | D1 chunk store; optional Supabase Storage and Firebase Firestore |
| Voice, video, screen share | Browser WebRTC, peer to peer mesh (max 12 per channel), optional Cloudflare Realtime TURN |
| Optional P2P acceleration | WebRTC data channels (history and file segments), verified by server signatures and SHA-256 |
| Images | Vendored WebAssembly JPEG XL and AVIF codecs in a Web Worker |
| Frontend | Plain ES modules, no build step, no framework, no runtime dependencies |
Free-tier limits are real and finite. Read docs/ARCHITECTURE.md before inviting people.
npm install
npm run migrate:local
npm run dev
Open http://127.0.0.1:8787, create an account, and save the recovery code shown once at signup. There is no email: the code is the only way to reset a forgotten password.
Tests:
npm run test:static # client module graph, CSP and unsafe-API checks, Markdown, push, codec and P2P engine tests; no server or browser needed
npm run test:signin # OAuth and passkey flows against a fake provider and a software authenticator; needs `npm run dev` started after copying test/signin.dev.vars to .dev.vars
npm test # backend integration test; needs `npm run dev` running; takes about a minute
Do not run npm test against a deployed instance: it creates many accounts and trips rate limits on purpose.
See docs/DEPLOYMENT.md.
MIT
Default theme is Deep Fjord (#212829) with Midnight Merlot (#521525) as the accent fill. Merlot alone is too dark to read as text or focus outlines on that background, so a lighter tint of it is used for those. Users can override both colours in settings.
public/vendor/codecs contains prebuilt single-threaded WebAssembly JPEG XL and AVIF encoders and decoders from jSquash (Apache-2.0, see public/vendor/codecs/LICENSE.jsquash). There are no other runtime dependencies.