Consort

Run your own Consort server

Chat, calls, and the HTTPS in front of them, installed together with one command. Your conversations stay on a machine you control.

Install

On any machine with Docker:

git clone https://github.com/Dyslectric/Consort.git
cd Consort/deploy
./consort up

up checks the machine, generates every secret, starts the services, creates your organization with an owner account, checks that everything works, and prints an address and a password. There’s nothing to fill in first.

Then, before your first call:

./consort trust

On a single machine, Consort serves HTTPS with a certificate authority it generates for you. trust prints the one-line command to trust it on your platform. Until you do, calls won’t load.

What you need

Software Docker, with Compose 2.24 or later
Memory and disk About 8 GB of memory and 10 GB of disk
Download About 2 GB the first time you run it
Windows Docker Desktop; run the commands from Git Bash

Everyday commands

up Start everything. Safe to run again after changing settings.
verify Check a running server.
logs Follow the logs.
down Stop, keeping all data.
destroy Stop and delete all data, secrets and generated files.

All settings live in one generated .env file.

Open it to other people

The defaults are for trying Consort on one machine. To let others reach it:

  1. Give the chat and video hostnames real domain names, with DNS pointing at your server.
  2. Switch the built-in web server from local certificates to automatic ones from a certificate authority.
  3. Tell the video bridge your server’s public address, and open its UDP port in your firewall.
  4. Decide who may join calls in channels that are open to the public web.

Already run Traefik? Consort can sit behind it.

Notifications

Notifications to browsers and Android work out of the box: the install creates the keys Web Push needs, and nothing passes through us. Give it a contact address at a real domain, because Apple’s push service refuses anything else. How push notifications work.

Single sign-on

People can sign in through your identity provider with SAML. You can offer more than one login button.

Read the full deployment guide on GitHub

Or in the cloud

Consort runs just as well on a cloud server as on your own hardware: follow the steps above to open it to other people. We’re also considering a hosted Consort service of our own.