opendesk

opendesk

opendesk brings your support email, live chat and help center into one shared inbox, and every change shows up live for everyone on the team. It ships as a hosted service at opendesk.sh and as a self-hosted install, and the two run the same code. Ollie, the built-in AI, drafts, triages and answers alongside your team, with any Anthropic or OpenAI-compatible provider, including local models.

Features

• Shared inbox - tickets with status, priority, assignee, team, tags and SLA; notes, merge, snooze, bulk edit
• Mailboxes - forward your support address in, reply from it through Google, Microsoft or SMTP
• Live chat - an embeddable widget with identity verification, typing and live delivery
• Knowledge base - collections and articles, published to a public help center
• Ollie and bots - drafts, summaries, triage, translation and chat answers from your knowledge base
• Automations and SLAs - rules that run on ticket events, and targets per priority
• Reports and CSAT - volume, response and resolution times, breaches and satisfaction
• Integrations - Linear, GitHub, Jira, Sentry, Slack, Stripe and any MCP server
• Public API - the REST API the app itself uses, plus signed webhooks, a realtime socket and MCP
• Apps - desktop for macOS, Windows and Linux, and a native iPhone app

How it works

opendesk is one Go binary (the API, background jobs and the event relay), an Elixir realtime gateway that holds no database connection, and Postgres. Every change that someone else should see is written as an event in the same transaction as the change; the relay publishes it to NATS, the gateway pushes it to browsers, and webhooks deliver it to your endpoints. There is no Redis and no Kafka.

flowchart LR
  B["Browsers · apps"] --> C["Caddy"]
  C -- "/socket" --> RT["Realtime gateway"]
  C --> OD["opendesk<br/>API · jobs · web app"]
  OD --> DB[("Postgres")]
  OD -- "events" --> N{{"NATS"}}
  N --> RT
  OD --> WH["Webhooks"]
  OD --> M["Google · Microsoft · SMTP"]

Self-hosted, NATS runs embedded in the opendesk binary and the whole stack sits behind Caddy on one domain. The hosted service splits the same binary into API and worker roles. Full write-up in the introduction and the cloud architecture.

Quick start

You need Go, Node.js with pnpm, Elixir, and Docker for Postgres.

git clone https://github.com/useopendesk/opendesk && cd opendesk
cp .env.example .env
make dev-db      # Postgres on localhost:55432
make api         # the Go API and workers, with embedded NATS on :4222
make realtime    # the Elixir gateway on :4000
make web         # the web app on :5173

Open http://localhost:5173 and sign up. Until you configure a mail driver, verification and invitation emails are printed to the API log. make site and make docs run the marketing site and the docs. More in the contributing guide.

Self-hosting

Self-hosted opendesk is free forever, with no limits, and runs the same code as the hosted service. One command installs it on any Linux server with Docker:

curl -fsSL https://opendesk.sh/install.sh | sh

It asks for your domain and an email for the TLS certificate, generates every secret, pins a release, verifies each file against the release's checksums, and serves opendesk over HTTPS with Caddy. Open your domain and sign up; the first account becomes the workspace owner. Add --wizard and it also asks about email, storage, inbound mail, AI and sign-ups. The script is checksummed at install.sh.sha256 if you would rather read and verify it first, and --dry-run prints the .env it would write without touching anything. Every flag: install script.

To build it from source instead:

git clone https://github.com/useopendesk/opendesk && cd opendesk
make selfhost-up

[!WARNING] The installer writes /opt/opendesk/.env, which holds the only copy of CREDENTIALS_KEY, the key that encrypts mailbox credentials. Lose it and every stored credential is unreadable. opendesk-ctl backup saves it with the database.

opendesk-ctl in the install directory runs the instance: status, logs, backup, restore, upgrade, start and stop. From here the self-hosting guide covers email, Google and Microsoft sign-in, storage, AI, hardening, scaling and backups.

Documentation

The full docs live at docs.opendesk.sh.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗