Self-Hosting

NoLag is open source. The broker and the authorization layer behind it are both Apache 2.0 and both on GitHub, so you can run as much or as little of it as you want.

There are three ways to run it, and the difference is only who holds what.

Option 1: the whole stack, on your machine

Everything local. Nothing contacts NoLag, and you do not need an account.

git clone https://github.com/NoLagApp/nolag-core
cd nolag-core
./quickstart/quickstart.sh

That brings up Postgres, core, kraken and an admin UI, and seeds a demo project. The first run compiles kraken from source and takes a few minutes; after that it is seconds.

Access tokens for the demo project are written to quickstart/credentials.json. They are shown once, because core stores only their hashes.

Connecting is then identical to connecting to hosted NoLag, with a different URL:

import { NoLag } from "@nolag/js-sdk";

const client = NoLag(TOKEN, { url: "ws://localhost:8410/ws" });
await client.connect();
client.subscribe("my-app/general/messages");

Just the broker

If you only want the broker and intend to supply your own auth, kraken runs on its own with no database and no external message broker:

git clone https://github.com/NoLagApp/kraken
cd kraken
docker compose up

That gives you a complete realtime backend on ws://localhost:8080/ws, with tokens read from examples/auth.json. Four things are pluggable, and each has a zero-dependency default:

Option 2: your broker, our control plane

Run kraken yourself, and let NoLag answer the authorization questions. Token validation, ACLs, rooms, presence and quota come from NoLag, while fan-out and message history stay on your infrastructure, so NoLag never sees a message payload.

Mint a link key in the portal, then:

NOLAG_LINK_KEY=nlg_link_xxxx.<secret> \
  docker compose -f docker-compose.cloud.yml up

One environment variable is the whole difference. This is the middle ground between the auth.json quickstart and the fully hosted product, and it is the right answer if you cannot send data to a third party but would rather not build an auth control plane either.

docs/CLOUD.md in the kraken repository sets out exactly what NoLag does and does not receive.

Option 3: hosted

We run all of it. No infrastructure, and you get the portal, usage dashboards, replay and billing. See pricing, or start with the quick start.

Which one

What is not open source

The hosted portal, usage metering and billing are not. Everything that exists only because someone runs NoLag as a commercial service lives outside the two repositories above.

We are not currently accepting external code contributions. Issues and bug reports are welcome.