Marcello Costagliola
5cb4316133
Every page of a room's messages (opening the room, scrolling back, the refresh after reconnecting, the bot API) selects WHERE room_id = ? ORDER BY created_at LIMIT 40. With only the room_id index, SQLite reads every message in the room and sorts them in a temporary B-tree to return 40, so these requests grow with the room's history. A composite index on (room_id, created_at) lets SQLite read the 40 rows in order straight from the index. It covers every lookup the room_id index served, so that one goes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NuTtwJKhb77Dv7EQqv2C3C
Campfire
Campfire is a web-based chat application. It supports many of the features you'd expect, including:
- Multiple rooms, with access controls
- Direct messages
- File attachments with previews
- Search
- Notifications (via Web Push)
- @mentions
- API, with support for bot integrations
Running your own Campfire instance
Campfire's Docker image contains everything needed for a fully-functional,
single-machine deployment. This includes the web app, background jobs, caching,
file serving, and SSL. You can use our pre-built image at
ghcr.io/basecamp/once-campfire:latest, or build your own from this repo.
Deploying with ONCE
The easiest way to self-host Campfire is with ONCE. It will guide you through the initial set up and then keep your instance up to date automatically.
If you don't already have once installed, run this on the machine you want to run Campfire on:
curl https://get.once.com | sh
once will launch as soon as the install is finished.
Choose Campfire from the list of applications, follow the instructions, and ONCE will take care of the rest.
If you prefer the command line to the dashboard, you can deploy directly:
once deploy ghcr.io/basecamp/once-campfire --host chat.example.com
Deploying with Docker
If you'd rather run the Docker image yourself, you can read more about that in the self-hosting guide.
Tip
When you start Campfire for the first time, you'll be guided through a wizard to create an admin account. The email address that you enter for the admin account will be visible on the sign-in page, it's there so that people have someone to contact if they need help with their account. If that bothers you, put in any email address you want and create yourself a new admin account.
Other implementations
Campfire also has implementations in Django, Laravel, Elixir, Go and Rust:
| HTTP workload (requests/sec) | Rails | Django | Laravel | Elixir | Go | Rust |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Room page | 242 | 170 | 164 | 722 | 3,860 | 36,260 |
| Messages page | 402 | 196 | 175 | 1,053 | 5,573 | 40,872 |
| Sidebar | 541 | 615 | 715 | 1,275 | 19,753 | 34,672 |
| Search | 424 | 315 | 305 | 1,156 | 7,053 | 33,299 |
| Post a message | 225 | 154 | 137 | 801 | 4,767 | 6,896 |
Measured with 16 concurrent clients on an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395, with four hardware threads allocated to each app.
Development
You are welcome - and encouraged - to modify Campfire to your liking. Please see our development guide for how to get Campfire set up for local development.
Security
See SECURITY.md for how to report a vulnerability and a description of our trust model.