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 1.0.9
Released
The gateway is now actually in the download
This is the important one, and it is an apology. Every version of the setup
guide up to now told you to deploy "the realtime/ folder included with your
download". That folder was never in the download. An Invision application tar is built from the
application directory and cannot carry one, so there was nothing to unzip and no way to complete
Step 3 from the files you were given.
The gateway now ships as edrealtime-gateway-1.0.9.zip, a separate
file on this listing next to the application tar. It contains server.js,
package.json, Dockerfile and an .env.example to copy. The
setup guide has been rewritten around it.
If you have been stuck at Step 3, that was our fault and not yours. Download the zip, follow Step 3, and it will come up.
Support for Live Notifications
The gateway now recognises a member's own private notification channel, which the new Live Notifications application uses to push a notification to the one member it belongs to. The permission to join that channel is signed by your server for that member alone, so it works exactly like the private-message channels added in 1.0.7 — nobody can listen to anybody else's.
Live Notifications is optional and sold separately. Nothing here changes if you do not use it.
⚠ Redeploy your gateway
Replace your server.js with the one in
edrealtime-gateway-1.0.9.zip and restart the gateway. Your
RT_SECRET, your .env and your web-server route are all unchanged.
An older gateway does not reject an unknown channel loudly — it drops it in silence, with no error in any log. The only symptom is that a feature quietly does nothing, which is a miserable thing to debug. If you are running Live Notifications and it is falling back to its periodic check instead of arriving instantly, this is why.
The application itself is unchanged in this release.
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