Bring the "live" experience of the big platforms to your self-hosted community — without paying for a cloud subscription. Realtime makes topics feel alive: new posts appear the instant they're written, members can see who's in the room, and a typing indicator lets conversations flow like chat. It all runs on your own server, with no third-party service in the loop.
Three features, one lightweight app
⚡ Live Topics — New replies and reactions arrive the moment they're posted. Instead of hammering refresh, members get a tasteful "3 new replies" bar that loads the latest with a tap.
👀 Real-Time Viewing — A live "…is also here" presence pill sits by the topic title, showing who else is reading this very second. It turns a quiet thread into a room.
⌨️ Real-Time Typing — When someone starts writing a reply, everyone else sees a subtle "…is typing" indicator. Fewer duplicate posts, and the natural rhythm people expect from modern chat.
Why members and admins love it
Instant, no refresh over a persistent WebSocket connection
Runs entirely on your infrastructure — no SaaS, no per-seat pricing, no data leaving your servers
Never gets in the way — if the service is down, the community keeps working; realtime just pauses
Upgrade-safe — listens to IPS content events, never edits core files
Light on resources — a tiny Node.js process handling thousands of concurrent readers
(Full version includes the "How it works", requirements, and "what's in the download" sections.)
What's New in Version 1.0.10
Released
Gateway support for Chat
The gateway now recognises the three channels the new Chat application uses — a member's own channel, a private conversation, and a chat room. As with private messages, the permission to join any of them is signed by your server for one specific member, so the gateway never learns your rules and a room cannot be reached by guessing its number.
Chat is optional and sold separately. If you do not use it, nothing here changes for you.
⚠ Redeploy your gateway
Download edrealtime-gateway-1.0.10.zip from this listing,
replace your server.js with the one inside, and restart. Your
RT_SECRET, your .env and your web-server route are unchanged.
This matters more than it sounds. An older gateway does not reject a channel it does not recognise — it drops it in silence. No error, no log entry, nothing in the browser console. The socket stays open and looks perfectly healthy, and the feature simply never does anything. If you install Chat and messages only appear after a page reload, this is why, and this is the fix.
If you run it in Docker
Replacing the file is not enough on its own if your docker-compose.yml
builds the image rather than mounting the folder — docker restart will start
the same old image again and nothing will change. Rebuild:
docker compose build && docker compose up -d
To confirm the new code is really running:
docker exec <container> grep -c "chat(user|dm|room)" /app/server.js
Anything other than 0 means it took.
The application itself is unchanged in this release.
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