ichat

Why ichat?

Most self-hosted interfaces are built for servers, not devices. They're powerful but demand heavy resources and hours of configuration.

ichat carves out a different space: privacy without the complexity. You get the features you actually need, optimized for modest hardware: Raspberry Pi/old laptops/minimal VPS while keeping many features of commercial products.

	Privacy	Power	Setup
Commercial (ChatGPT)	❌ Cloud-only	✅ High	✅ Zero-config
Typical Self-Host (Open WebUI)	✅ Local	✅ High	❌ Config hell
ichat	✅ Local	⚖️ Just enough	✅ Zero-config

Features

Feature	What You Get
Speed	Sub-second cold starts, real-time token streaming
Chat Modes	Normal, Web Search, & Deep Research with autonomous agents
Rich Media	PDF uploads, LaTeX rendering, image generation
Universal API	Any OpenAI-compatible provider (OpenRouter, local models, NewAPI-backed setups, etc.)
NewAPI Backend Auth	Login, registration, session reuse, and per-user model access through a NewAPI backend
NewAPI Pay API	Forward account top-up and payment requests through the same NewAPI session
Minimal Footprint	~17MB binary, <128MB RAM usage

Quickstart

Default Login: admin / P@88w0rd

Docker (30-second setup)

docker run -it --rm \
  -e API_KEY="<YOUR_API_KEY>" \
  -e NEWAPI_AUTH_BASE="https://aiapi.xjh2000.top/" \
  -e API_BASE="https://aiapi.xjh2000.top" \
  -p 3000:80 \
  -v "$(pwd)/data:/data" \
  ghcr.io/isomoes/ichat-web:latest

This setup is ready for a NewAPI-backed deployment out of the box. Just set API_KEY and adjust the NewAPI URLs if you use a different backend.

That's it. No config files. No Python dependencies.

Docker Compose

services:
  ichat:
    image: ghcr.io/isomoes/ichat-web:latest
    restart: on-failure:3
    environment:
      - "API_KEY=<YOUR_API_KEY>"
      - "NEWAPI_AUTH_BASE=https://aiapi.xjh2000.top/"
      - "API_BASE=https://aiapi.xjh2000.top"
    volumes:
      - "./data:/data"
    ports:
      - "3000:80"

Then run:

docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:3000 and sign in with the default account: admin / P@88w0rd.

See docker sample for more docker-compose examples.

Building from Source

See BUILD.md for detailed build instructions.

NewAPI Integration

ichat has first-class support for using NewAPI as the backend auth and account system while keeping the browser pointed at ichat only.

When NEWAPI_AUTH_BASE is set, ichat can:

• use NewAPI for login and registration
• reuse each user's NewAPI session server-side
• load per-user model lists from NewAPI
• reuse each user's linked NewAPI API key
• forward balance top-up and payment requests to NewAPI's pay API

Configure the backend with:

export NEWAPI_AUTH_BASE="https://newapi.example.com"
export NEWAPI_AUTH_BEARER="optional-service-token"
export NEWAPI_AUTH_USER_HEADER="New-Api-User"

This lets ichat proxy auth and account actions server-to-server without exposing the NewAPI backend directly to the browser.

Configuration (Optional)

Variable	Description	Default
API_KEY	OpenAI-compatible provider key	required
API_BASE	Custom endpoint	https://openrouter.ai/api
DATA_PATH	Storage directory	.
BIND_ADDR	Network Socket	0.0.0.0:80
NEWAPI_AUTH_BASE	Optional NewAPI auth server base URL	unset
NEWAPI_AUTH_BEARER	Optional bearer token for NewAPI auth requests	unset
NEWAPI_AUTH_USER_HEADER	Optional header name used to forward the NewAPI user identity	New-Api-User

Acknowledgement

ichat builds on the earlier llumen project by pinkfuwa:

https://github.com/pinkfuwa/llumen