Foglet is an SSH-first bulletin board system. This page explains what it is, what it is not, and whether you are in the right place.
Foglet's front door is SSH. Callers connect with a normal SSH client and use a terminal UI for registration, login, boards, threads, replies, BBS Mail, account settings, SSH keys, oneliners, door games, and the sysop workflows that are implemented in the TUI.
The Phoenix web endpoint is still important, but it is not the product surface.
It serves the home page, these public docs, the /up health check, development
LiveDashboard when dev routes are enabled, PubSub, telemetry, mail plumbing, and
other operational infrastructure. Foglet is not a browser forum.
What Foglet is for
Foglet fits when you want:
- a small self-hosted community with a sysop in charge;
- terminal-native access over SSH, not a web-first forum;
- named categories and boards, threaded discussion, replies, read state, and stable per-board message numbers;
- password login and SSH public-key login after a user has a key on file;
- operator-owned registration, invites, account status, roles, boards, runtime settings, and moderation flows where those features are implemented;
- an in-TUI inbox for durable notifications such as replies and @mentions;
- BBS Mail for direct user-to-user messages inside the terminal;
- board news/feed pages where sysops attach RSS or Atom sources;
- door games that hand off the caller's terminal session and return to the BBS when the door exits.
Foglet is built with Elixir/OTP, Phoenix, Postgres, and Raxol. Postgres is the durable store. OTP processes, ETS caches, PubSub, and per-board servers are runtime machinery and must be recoverable after restart.
What Foglet is not
Do not run Foglet as though these exist today:
- an end-user web forum;
- a browser admin console;
- a hosted Foglet cloud service;
- federation;
- a mobile app;
- email digests;
- webhook notifications;
- a full case-management moderation suite.
If you need one of those as a hard requirement, Foglet is probably not the right system yet.
Public docs map
Start here if you are deciding whether to run Foglet:
- Requirements covers the tools, services, ports, and persistent state Foglet expects.
- Quickstart gives the shortest local path from clone to SSH login.
- Manual setup expands the local setup path and common variants.
- Environment configuration covers deploy-time environment variables.
- Health and logs covers
/up, logs, and startup checks.
Contributor-only material, QA credentials, internal planning notes, and test harness details are intentionally left out of these operator docs.