TLS

Serve the chat server over HTTPS for anything beyond testing on your own machine:

• The microphone and camera only work on secure pages. The chat window is a page on your chat server, so voice and the webcam need it on https:// (and your site too).
• Mixed content. An https:// site can't load a script or a frame from an http:// server: the browser blocks the chat entirely.
• The admin panel's session cookie is marked Secure when PUBLIC_URL starts with https://.

localhost counts as secure, so http://localhost:8800 works for local testing, microphone included. To test on a phone, which can't reach your localhost, you need a real certificate (or a tunnel that gives you an https address).

Getting a certificate

The server doesn't handle TLS itself: a reverse proxy in front of it does. The easiest options:

• Caddy gets and renews Let's Encrypt certificates on its own. See Reverse proxy.
• nginx with certbot (Let's Encrypt).
• A CDN or load balancer that terminates TLS (Cloudflare, a cloud load balancer).

Then set PUBLIC_URL=https://chat.example.com and TRUST_PROXY=true, and restart the server.

A separate host name for the chat (chat.example.com) is simplest: it keeps the chat's cookies and storage apart from your main site, and the server needs to be the root of its host anyway.