Revolt — Self-Hosted Open Source Chat Platform

Introduction

Revolt is an open-source chat platform designed as a privacy-respecting alternative to Discord. It provides text channels, voice chat, direct messaging, and server-based community organization while letting you retain full control over your data by self-hosting the entire stack.

What Revolt Does

• Provides text, voice, and video communication channels organized into servers
• Supports rich messaging with embeds, emoji, reactions, and file attachments
• Offers role-based permissions and moderation tools for community management
• Delivers a responsive web client, desktop app, and mobile clients
• Enables full self-hosting with Docker Compose for complete data sovereignty

Architecture Overview

Revolt uses a microservice architecture with a Rust-based backend (Delta) handling the core API, a Bonfire service for WebSocket real-time events, and Autumn for file/media storage. The frontend is built with SolidJS. All services communicate through MongoDB for persistence and Redis for caching and pub/sub messaging. The self-hosted distribution bundles everything into a single Docker Compose configuration.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Deploy using the official Docker Compose template with a single docker compose up -d
• Configure through environment variables in the .env file for domain, SMTP, and storage settings
• Requires MongoDB and Redis, both included in the Compose stack
• Set up a reverse proxy (Nginx or Caddy) with TLS for production deployments
• Customize branding, registration policies, and federation settings via configuration files

Key Features

• Full Discord-like experience with servers, channels, roles, and permissions
• End-to-end control of user data with no third-party telemetry
• Built-in moderation tools including bans, kicks, and message management
• Bot API compatible with custom integrations and automation
• Lightweight Rust backend with low resource requirements compared to alternatives

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Discord — proprietary, no self-hosting, collects extensive user data
• Matrix/Element — federated protocol with more complexity; Revolt is simpler to deploy
• Rocket.Chat — enterprise-focused with heavier resource usage
• Mattermost — targets team collaboration rather than community chat
• Guilded — proprietary gaming-focused platform with no self-hosting option

FAQ

Q: What are the minimum hardware requirements for self-hosting Revolt? A: Revolt runs comfortably on a VPS with 2 GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores for small communities. Larger deployments may need more resources for MongoDB and media storage.

Q: Does Revolt support federation with other instances? A: Federation is on the roadmap but not yet implemented. Each Revolt instance currently operates independently.

Q: Can I migrate users from Discord to Revolt? A: There is no built-in migration tool, but community-developed bots and scripts exist to help bridge or import channel history.

Q: Is Revolt fully free and open source? A: Yes, all Revolt components are released under open-source licenses. The self-hosted stack is free to deploy with no proprietary dependencies.

Sources

• https://github.com/revoltchat/revolt
• https://revolt.chat
• https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted