Townhall

A free, open source chat app built for communities of any size.

Townhall aims to be a simple, privacy-respecting alternative to platforms like Discord. No ads, no AI training on your data, no forced identity verification. Just chat.

Why Townhall?

• Free and open source — the code is public, forkable, and self-hostable
• No tracking — no analytics, no algorithms, no data harvesting
• No identity verification — no face scans, no ID uploads, no phone number required
• Self-host or use hosted — run it on your own server or use the hosted version

Project Structure

This is a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo:

apps/
  web/          — Main chat app (Vite + React + TanStack Router)
  www/          — Marketing site & waitlist (Next.js)
  api/          — Hono API server
  realtime/     — Socket.IO realtime gateway

packages/
  api-client/   — Shared type-safe Hono API client
  auth/         — Better Auth configuration and helpers
  ui/           — Shared shadcn/ui component library
  db/           — Drizzle ORM schema & database client
  env/          — Type-safe environment variables (server/client)
  utils/        — Shared utility helpers
  typescript-config/ — Shared TypeScript configs

Getting Started

# Install dependencies
pnpm install

# Copy env file and fill in values
cp .env.example .env

# Push database schema
pnpm db:push

# Start all apps in dev mode
pnpm dev

Scripts

Command	Description
pnpm dev	Start all apps in development mode
pnpm build	Build all apps and packages
pnpm check	Run Biome linting and formatting checks
pnpm check:fix	Auto-fix Biome issues
pnpm db:push	Push Drizzle schema to database
pnpm db:studio	Open Drizzle Studio

License

MIT