Chatwoot Open Source Customer Support Platform

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Run Your Own Customer Support Inbox in Minutes

Chatwoot is an open source customer engagement platform that brings website live chat, email, and social messaging into one shared team inbox. With over 34,000 GitHub stars, it is one of the most widely adopted open source customer support platforms available. This AMI delivers Chatwoot fully installed and answering behind a hardened nginx reverse proxy, so your inbox is live within minutes of launch.

Because the whole platform runs on an instance in your own AWS account, your customer conversations, contact records, and file attachments stay inside your environment rather than a third-party SaaS tenant.

## Why This AMI Instead of Self-Deploy

Standing up Chatwoot by hand means installing Docker, assembling the production Compose stack, running PostgreSQL with pgvector and a password-protected Redis, wiring a reverse proxy with the WebSocket upgrade live chat needs, provisioning storage, generating secrets, and bootstrapping the first administrator. This AMI removes all of it:

• Application containers version-frozen to a pinned upstream release for reproducible deployments
• Dedicated data disk you can resize independently of the operating system disk
• Unique per-instance secrets generated on first boot - no shared or default credentials
• Reverse proxy preconfigured with the WebSocket upgrade real-time chat requires
• Full data ownership and operational control on your own AWS infrastructure
• 24/7 cloudimg support for deployment, configuration, and troubleshooting

## Application Stack

Chatwoot runs as four containers under a single systemd service:

• Rails web application - the agent inbox and administration interface
• Sidekiq worker - background jobs, notifications, and scheduled work
• PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension
• Redis - cache, queue and real-time pub/sub

The Rails application is bound to the loopback interface and fronted by nginx on port 80, with the WebSocket upgrade headers preconfigured so live chat and the real-time inbox work out of the box. The database, cache, and uploaded attachments live on a dedicated data disk, resizable independently of the operating system disk.

## One Inbox for Every Channel

Agents handle website live chat, email, and social messaging channels side by side in one conversation view. Contacts are unified across channels, conversations can be assigned to teams or individual agents, labelled and filtered, and answered faster with canned responses. Built-in reporting covers conversation volume, agent activity, and resolution behaviour, and a website live chat widget can be embedded on any site you own.

## Secure by Default

No usable login is baked into the image. On first boot a one-shot service generates a fresh application secret, a fresh database password, and a fresh cache password, initialises an empty database under those rotated secrets, points the application at the instance's own address, then creates a single administrator account with a randomly generated password recorded in a root-only credentials file. Account self-signup is disabled, so a freshly launched instance is never open to the public. Only the nginx front door is published on the instance interface - the application, database, and cache are reachable on the loopback interface or the internal container network only. For HTTPS, point a DNS hostname at the instance and attach Let's Encrypt, or terminate TLS on an AWS Application Load Balancer. For data at rest, enable EBS encryption on the dedicated data disk.

## Use Cases

• Growing SaaS support team (5-15 agents): Give a small but scaling support team one place to work every customer conversation, with assignment, labels, canned responses, and reporting - hosted on infrastructure you control without per-seat SaaS fees climbing as you grow.
• E-commerce live chat: Embed a live chat widget on your storefront and answer visitor questions in real time from the agent inbox, with the WebSocket path already configured for instant message delivery.
• Multichannel B2B messaging: Unify email and social messaging channels alongside live chat so contacts and conversation history stay together in a single self-hosted platform, keeping customer data inside your own AWS account.

## Get Started

Launch the AMI, read your administrator credentials from the root-only file, and sign in to configure channels. The paired cloudimg user guide walks through DNS, TLS, SMTP and channel setup step by step: https://www.cloudimg.co.uk/guides/chatwoot-aws/

## Licensing

Chatwoot ships unmodified from the upstream release. Code outside the repository's enterprise directory is MIT licensed; that directory carries Chatwoot's own separate licence and its features need a licence key from Chatwoot. cloudimg is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Chatwoot.