Campfire (base14 fork)

A fork of basecamp/once-campfire maintained for internal use at base14, with Postgres as the system of record, Keycloak SSO, and a few UI tweaks.

We chose to fork rather than overlay so changes live as ordinary Rails code in this repository — easier to read, review, and rebase against upstream when we want.

Note: this is an internal tool. We publish it because the modifications might be useful to others, but support and roadmap are driven by base14's needs first.

What's different from upstream

	Upstream	This fork
Database	SQLite + FTS5	Postgres + tsvector / GIN
Cache & queues	Redis	Valkey (Redis-compatible)
Auth	Email + password only	Email + password and Keycloak/OIDC SSO
Login UI	Email/password form, admin email exposed via mailto	"Login" SSO button (gated on KEYCLOAK_ENABLED), password fallback collapsed under a disclosure, no admin-mailto leak
Search backend	SQLite FTS5 virtual table	Postgres tsvector index with websearch_to_tsquery
Backup script	SQLite native backup	pg_dump --format=custom

Everything else — chat, attachments, push notifications, bots, API — is upstream Campfire unchanged.

Quick start

Two stacks are provided:

• compose.yml — full stack (Postgres + Valkey + Keycloak + Campfire)
• compose.deps.yml — dependencies only, for running Rails on your host

Run everything in Docker

cp .env.sample .env
# generate SECRET_KEY_BASE and edit .env
make setup-host       # adds 127.0.0.1 keycloak.local to /etc/hosts (sudo)
make build
make up

Open http://localhost:8080. Sign in with the bundled Keycloak users (alice@base14.dev / password) or create a password account.

Run Rails locally, deps in Docker

cp .env.sample .env
# edit .env (or rely on the per-env .env.development pattern)
make deps-up                  # postgres + valkey + keycloak on localhost
bundle install
bin/rails db:prepare
bin/rails server              # http://localhost:3000

dotenv-rails auto-loads .env, so bin/rails, rake, etc. pick up the same vars docker compose reads.

Configuration

See .env.sample for the full list. The Keycloak knobs:

Var	Purpose
KEYCLOAK_ENABLED	Toggle SSO. When unset, the app falls back to upstream email+password behavior
KEYCLOAK_ISSUER	OIDC issuer URL (browser-facing)
KEYCLOAK_INTERNAL_URL	Optional server-side base URL when the issuer hostname isn't reachable inside the compose network
KEYCLOAK_CLIENT_ID / KEYCLOAK_CLIENT_SECRET	OIDC client credentials
KEYCLOAK_REDIRECT_URI	Must match the URI registered in the realm
SSO_AUTO_PROVISION	When 1, first SSO login auto-creates the local User
SSO_ONLY	When 1, hide the password fallback on the login page

Roadmap

These are the planned changes. Items are roughly ordered, but priorities shift as we hit real usage.

• Keycloak SSO — realm-to-room authorization. Map Keycloak realm roles or group membership to Campfire room access so some realms can be restricted to specific rooms (e.g. an "ops" realm sees the #incidents room but not #sales). Today, all SSO users land with no rooms and rely on an admin to add them.
• Theme improvements. A proper dark/light tokenization and a base14 brand theme rather than a force-light CSS hack. Treat logo, fonts, accent colors, and Action Text styling holistically.
• Helm chart. Deploy to Kubernetes with a single chart that wires Postgres, Valkey/Redis, and the Campfire app, with config exposed via values.yaml. Bring-your-own-Keycloak.
• HA setup. Run multiple Campfire replicas behind a load balancer with shared Postgres + Redis, externalize Active Storage to S3-compatible object storage, and document the failover/restore runbook. The fork's switch from SQLite to Postgres is the prerequisite for this.

If something here matters to your deployment, open an issue or PR — base14 uses this repo for our own chat, so meaningful contributions will land.

Tracking upstream

git remote add upstream https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
git fetch upstream
git log v1.4.3..upstream/main --oneline      # see what changed
git merge upstream/v1.5.0                    # or whatever tag you want, resolve conflicts

The conflict surface is small (a dozen files): Gemfile, config/database.yml, the new search migration, app/models/message/searchable.rb, the login view, and the SSO-related additions under app/controllers/.

License

MIT, same as upstream basecamp/once-campfire. See LICENSE.