Self-hosting Crumb in an afternoon

Crumb is AGPL-3.0, and self-hosting it for your own company is fully permitted. There's no Crumb account to create and no feature held hostage behind a license server; the same repo powers Community and Cloud. Here's the short path.

One command

Clone the repo and bring the whole stack (dashboard, widget, and Postgres) up with Docker:

docker compose up -d --build

That's the fast path. If you want a full local dev environment instead:

pnpm install
pnpm db:up         # Postgres in Docker on :5432
pnpm db:push       # apply the schema
pnpm db:seed       # sample data (the Southbeam workspace)
pnpm widget:build  # build the embed widget
pnpm dev           # → http://localhost:3000

A fresh database drops you at /onboard to create your first workspace and admin. The seed data logs you in as a sample user via a magic link printed to stdout.

It's all yours

Everything lives in a Postgres you control. Back it up with a one-liner:

docker compose exec -T postgres pg_dump -U crumb -Fc crumb > crumb-$(date +%F).dump

Health checks are built in: GET /api/health for liveness and GET /api/health/ready for readiness, which only returns 200 when the database is reachable. Handy behind a load balancer.

Going to production

For a real deployment, the repo's deploy guide walks through a VPS setup, including a zero-inbound-ports option using a Cloudflare Tunnel. When you're ready for managed email, one-click OAuth, and the AI features without running them yourself, Crumb Cloud is the same software, hosted.