Papercups is an open source live customer chat web app. We offer a hosted version at app.papercups.io.

You can check out how our chat widget looks and play around with customizing it on our demo page. The chat widget component is also open sourced at github.com/papercups-io/chat-widget.

Watch how easy it is to get set up with our Slack integration 🚀 :

We wanted to make a self-hosted version of tools like Intercom and Drift for companies that have privacy and security concerns about having customer data going to third party services. We’re starting with chat right now but we want to expand into all forms of customer communication like email campaigns and push notifications.

Stay tuned! We'll be posting a more detailed roadmap soon 🤓

Papercups runs on Elixir/Phoenix, with a TypeScript React app for the frontend.

If you haven't installed Elixir, Phoenix, NodeJS, and PostgresQL yet, you can find some great instructions here: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/installation.html

tl;dr:

• Install Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/install.html
• Install Hex:

mix local.hex

• To check that we are on Elixir 1.6 and Erlang 20 or later, run:

elixir -v
Erlang/OTP 20 [erts-9.3] [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false] [dtrace]

Elixir 1.6.3

• Install the Phoenix application generator:

mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.5.4

• Install NodeJS: https://nodejs.org/en/download/
• Install PostgresQL: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Detailed_installation_guides

git clone [email protected]:papercups-io/papercups.git
cd papercups

• Install dependencies with mix deps.get
• Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.setup
• Start the server with mix phx.server

This will automatically start up the React frontend in watch mode on localhost:3000, with the API running on localhost:4000.

The frontend code will start up automatically when you run mix phx.server, but for more information see: assets/README.md

Create a PostgreSQL test database named: chat_api_test, and run:

mix test

Set the environment variables in the .env.example file.

At the moment we only support Mailgun — other messaging channels are coming soon!

We currently use Heroku for deployments:

git push heroku master

Note: Make sure you are running this inside of ChatApi otherwise it'll trigger on UI changes

./scripts/compile_watch.sh

• Official website: https://www.phoenixframework.org/
• Guides: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html
• Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix
• Forum: https://elixirforum.com/c/phoenix-forum
• Source: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix