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Staff Chat

A real-time chat widget for your team — a floating icon in the bottom-right corner of the Staff and Admin areas, backed by Laravel Reverb (self-hosted, no third-party service or subscription required).
This is the one feature in this product that will not run on typical shared/cPanel hosting. Everything else in this CRM only needs PHP, MySQL, and a web server — Staff Chat additionally needs a persistent background process, SSH/root access, and a dedicated proxied port. If you’re on shared hosting, skip this add-on — the rest of the CRM works exactly the same without it.

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Before you install this: check your hosting

  • A persistent background process (php artisan reverb:start) kept running at all times via a process supervisor (systemd or Supervisor).
  • SSH/root access to your server, to set that supervisor up and to configure your web server to proxy WebSocket connections through to Reverb.
  • A dedicated port open for Reverb (default 8080), reverse-proxied under your main domain so the browser can reach it over wss:// on port 443.
If you’re on a VPS or dedicated server with root access, this is a one-time setup.

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Setup

1

Set real values in .env

2

Rebuild frontend assets

So the new VITE_REVERB_* values are baked in:
3

Proxy WebSocket traffic

For Apache, enable mod_proxy_wstunnel and add to your vhost:
For Nginx, use a location block with proxy_set_header Upgrade/Connection "upgrade" pointed at 127.0.0.1:8080.
4

Start Reverb under a supervisor

So it survives reboots and crashes, for example with Supervisor:
5

Clear config and reload

Then reload your web server.
The chat widget checks whether BROADCAST_CONNECTION is actually set to reverb before it does anything — if you skip this setup, the widget simply doesn’t appear rather than showing a broken feature.

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What it does

  • One shared channel for your whole team (all Staff and Admin users) — not per-project or direct-message channels in this version.
  • Fires a chat_message_sent hook after every message, so you can build on it — see Customizing with Hooks if you want to, say, forward messages to Slack too.