Talkyard

Talkyard is a self‑hosted, full‑stack discussion platform that blends the best of StackOverflow’s Q&A model, Slack’s real‑time chat, Discourse’s community moderation, Reddit/HackerNews’s upvote mechanics, and Disqus’ embedded comment system. From a developer perspective it is a modular Ruby‑on‑Rails application that exposes a rich API surface, supports extensibility through plugins, and can be deployed as a containerized microservice or a traditional Rails app. Its core goal is to surface knowledge in an indexed, searchable format while still allowing spontaneous collaboration through chat rooms.

Technical Stack & Architecture

• Language & Framework: Ruby 3.x + Rails 7, leveraging Hotwire for instant UI updates and Stimulus‑Reflex for real‑time interactions.
• Database: PostgreSQL 15 (primary), with optional Redis for caching and ActionCable back‑end. Full‑text search is powered by PostgreSQL’s tsvector or optionally ElasticSearch if high‑volume analytics are required.
• Background Jobs: Sidekiq (Redis) for email digests, moderation queues, and external webhook triggers.
• Web Server: Puma behind Nginx (or Traefik) with TLS termination. The app can be run in a Docker container or as a Ruby on Rails service inside Kubernetes.
• Static Assets: Webpacker (or Import‑Maps) with Tailwind CSS, providing a responsive UI that can be theme‑overridden through SCSS variables.

Core Capabilities & Developer APIs

• RESTful JSON API: CRUD operations for users, topics, posts, votes, and chat messages. Endpoints support pagination, filtering, and eager‑loading to reduce N+1 queries.
• Webhooks: Outbound events for new posts, edits, or votes that can be consumed by external systems (e.g., Slack integration, CI pipelines).
• GraphQL Endpoint: Optional GraphQL layer for flexible client queries; useful for mobile or single‑page applications.
• Plugin System: Developers can write Rails engines that mount under /talkyard/plugins/*. Plugins may hook into lifecycle callbacks, add new models, or extend the API. The community has already produced plugins for authentication (OAuth2), analytics dashboards, and custom moderation rules.
• Embedded Comments: A lightweight JavaScript snippet (<script src="…/embed.js"></script>) that can be dropped into any static site to render a comment thread tied to the page URL. The embed communicates with Talkyard’s API over HTTPS, using CSRF‑free tokens.

Deployment & Infrastructure

Talkyard is designed for self‑hosting on any Linux server or cloud instance. The recommended deployment path is to use the talkyard-prod-one repository, which bundles Docker Compose files for a single‑node stack. For larger installations:

• Horizontal Scaling: Multiple Rails workers behind a load balancer; Redis and PostgreSQL can be clustered or sharded.
• High Availability: Deploy Postgres in a Patroni cluster, Sidekiq workers behind a Redis Sentinel setup.
• Containerization: The Docker image is lightweight (≈ 200 MB) and can be orchestrated by Kubernetes, ECS, or Nomad. Helm charts are forthcoming to simplify multi‑node setups.

Integration & Extensibility

• Authentication: Supports Devise out of the box with LDAP, SAML, or OAuth2 providers. Custom auth adapters can be injected via Rails’ initializer hooks.
• Search & Analytics: Exposes a full‑text search endpoint and can be integrated with external search engines (ElasticSearch, Meilisearch) for faceted browsing.
• Custom UI: The front‑end is componentized; developers can swap out the default Tailwind theme with Bootstrap or Material‑UI by overriding assets in an engine.
• Webhooks & Callbacks: Every major action emits a JSON payload that external services can listen to via HTTP. Conversely, Talkyard can consume webhooks from GitHub or Jira to create topics automatically.

Developer Experience

• Documentation: The repo contains a comprehensive docs/ folder, covering API usage, plugin development, and deployment guides. Inline code comments are plentiful, making the codebase approachable for contributors.
• Community: An active issue tracker and discussion forum on Talkyard itself provide rapid feedback. The project’s MIT license allows commercial use without licensing fees.
• Testing: RSpec and Capybara suites are included, enabling CI pipelines to run full regression tests quickly. The test database uses pg_trgm for search coverage.

Use Cases

• Enterprise Knowledge Base: Embed Talkyard comments into internal wikis or Confluence pages to surface Q&A history.
• Customer Support: Host a public forum where users can post questions and moderators can answer; embed the thread into product documentation.
• Educational Platforms: Create course‑specific discussion boards with Q&A topics for assignments, and use the chat feature for live tutoring sessions.
• Open‑Source Projects: Replace or supplement GitHub Issues with structured discussions, retaining the ability to embed comments in README files.

Advantages Over Alternatives

• Unified Experience: One platform that covers Q&A, chat, and embedded comments—no need to stitch multiple SaaS products.
• **Full Control