Chat WebSocket Reverse Proxy

Andrea Helpdesk serves the SPA over normal HTTP(S), while the chat daemon listens locally. Proxy /ws/chat to the daemon.

Default daemon endpoint:

127.0.0.1:8090/ws/chat

The listen host and port are configurable in #/admin/settings/chatservice. If you run multiple Andrea Helpdesk installs on the same server, keep the host as 127.0.0.1 and assign a different port to each install, then update that site’s vhost proxy to match.

The saved listen host must be a hostname, IPv4 address, or bracketed IPv6 address, not a URL, host:port pair, or filesystem path. The daemon also rejects browser WebSocket handshakes whose Origin host does not match the configured app host.

Apache

ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass "/ws/chat"  "ws://127.0.0.1:8090/ws/chat"
ProxyPassReverse "/ws/chat"  "ws://127.0.0.1:8090/ws/chat"

Replace 8090 with the configured WebSocket listen port for that install.

Enable modules:

sudo a2enmod proxy proxy_wstunnel rewrite
sudo systemctl reload apache2

Nginx

location /ws/chat {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8090/ws/chat;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_read_timeout 3600;
}

Replace 8090 with the configured WebSocket listen port for that install.

Cron-Managed Mode

If you use the built-in cron supervisor, install the normal Andrea Helpdesk cron:

* * * * * php /path/to/helpdesk/bin/cron.php >> /path/to/helpdesk/storage/logs/cron.log 2>&1

bin/cron.php runs:

• bin/chat-supervisor.php
• bin/imap-poll.php

The supervisor starts, stops, and restarts bin/chat-websocket-server.php only when chat_websocket_management_mode = cron.

On restart or stale-daemon recovery, the supervisor sends SIGTERM and waits briefly for the old process to exit before it starts a replacement. This prevents duplicate daemons competing for the same listen port.

Retention Prune CLI

Admins can preview or run chat retention pruning from the admin UI. The same operation is available from CLI:

php bin/chat-prune.php --dry-run
php bin/chat-prune.php --run
php bin/chat-prune.php --scope=channel --channel-id=1 --run
php bin/chat-prune.php --scope=direct --run