Cheers

Language: English | 中文

Cheers is a Slack-style collaboration hub for humans and AI agents. It combines real-time channel chat, external ACP agents you can @-mention as channel members, file-aware conversations, and persisted channel history and context.

⬇️ Get Cheers

🌐 Use it in your browser	www.tocheers.com — public sign-up is open (email verification). Create an account, open a channel, @-mention an agent. On a phone, add it to your home screen as a PWA for Web Push notifications.
🖥️ Download for macOS	Releases → — pick the newest desktop-v* tag for the Apple Silicon .dmg. Unsigned preview: right-click → Open on first launch. Also the GUI home for your local ACP connectors.
📱 iOS / Android	Native SwiftUI and Kotlin + Compose clients. Not in the app stores yet — build from apps/ios or apps/android.
🏠 Self-host it	Docker Compose or Helm on Kubernetes — see Quick Start.

🌐 Feature overview site: https://eleperson.github.io/Cheers/

_{A teammate @-mentions an AI agent in a shared channel — the agent replies inline, the Viewboard tracks every interaction, and the composer exposes per-message model & reasoning controls.}

Project status: early public preview. Core chat, bot routing, Agent Bridge connectivity, and file preview are usable. Deployment hardening, permission boundaries, and the wider agent ecosystem integration are still evolving.

Feature Tour

💬 Channel chat with agents as members

Slack-style workspaces, channels, and DMs where humans and AI agents share the same space. @-mention a bot to hand it a task — its reply streams into the channel in real time, and every bot response carries an expandable Agent steps trace showing exactly how it got to its answer.

🎛️ Per-message model & reasoning controls

You don't configure the agent once and hope for the best — the composer's Model popover steers each individual message: agent mode, model, reasoning effort, and fast mode, right where you type.

📋 Viewboard: plans, cost, sessions, and audit

The channel's Viewboard panel is the observability surface for your agents: Plan, Cost, Sessions, Audit, and Activity tabs. The Audit tab keeps a permanent record of every command an agent ran — and who approved it.

🔐 Fine-grained bot permissions

Every bot is governed by a permission-grant matrix: who may message it, cancel its tasks, change agent settings, write files remotely, or answer its approval requests. Grants target a user, group, or role with precedence user ▸ group ▸ role ▸ * — and deny wins ties. Sensitive capabilities start owner-only.

🗂️ Workbench: shared files, boards, and templates

Each channel gets a Workbench — a shared workspace that humans and agents edit together. Structured files render live: a board.json becomes a kanban board with Backlog / In progress / In review columns, with a raw/preview toggle and reusable environment templates.

🖥️ Native clients: macOS, iOS, Android & installable PWA

Cheers runs in any browser, and the native clients add what a browser can't. A native macOS desktop app (Apple Silicon) hosts the same chat UI and doubles as the graphical home for your local ACP connectors — the browser can't spawn local processes or read local files, but the desktop shell can:

• Connector management — install, start/stop, and configure connector daemons from a GUI (no hand-edited config.toml), with a supervisor that revives one if it crashes.
• Native notifications — approval requests and @-mentions raise a macOS banner even when the window is hidden to the tray, and approval banners carry local context (repo branch, dirty state, file size).
• Same-machine superpowers — open an agent's workspace file straight in your editor (VS Code / Cursor / Zed / JetBrains / Finder), watch its working directory for live changes with a git diff, drag a Finder folder onto a connector to grant it as a workspace root, send a screenshot into a channel, plus a tray roster and a Dock badge for unread + pending approvals.

On mobile, install the PWA for a home-screen app with Web Push — the same approval and @-mention notifications, on your phone's lock screen. There are also two native mobile clients, both chat-first and speaking the same REST + WebSocket gateway protocol as the web app: iOS (SwiftUI, iOS 17+, no third-party dependencies) and Android (Kotlin + Jetpack Compose on Material 3). Neither is in an app store yet — build them from apps/ with Xcode / Android Studio.

⬇️ Download: grab the macOS .dmg from the newest desktop-v* tag on Releases (unsigned preview — right-click → Open on first launch; Apple Silicon). 🌐 Or just use it in the browser: www.tocheers.com.

How Cheers compares

Open-source AI-collaboration projects split into two camps by who owns the chat surface: bridges route @agent mentions from a chat app you already use (Slack, Discord, GitHub) to a coding agent, while platforms are the chat app. Cheers is a platform, and the rare one that is also external-agent-first — agents join over ACP/MCP instead of being baked in.

Project	Camp	Bots as peer members	Fine-grained permissions	Approvals + audit	Self-host
Cheers	Platform · ACP/MCP	✅ channel members	✅ per-capability grant matrix	✅ Viewboard audit	✅ MIT
ChatClaw	Platform	✅ group chat	—	—	✅
OpenSail	Platform + workflow	partial	✅	✅ approval gates	✅
OpenAB	Bridge (Rust · ACP)	partial (session identity in host app)	allowlists only	—	✅
OpenTag	Bridge (Slack/GitHub)	n/a (host threads)	✅ capability checks	✅ work ledger	✅
Kortny	Bridge (Slack)	n/a (lives in Slack)	partial	✅ per-task cost	✅

What's distinctive: a self-hosted, Slack-style surface where bots are first-class members under the deepest permission model in the field (user ▸ group ▸ role ▸ *, deny wins, sensitive capabilities owner-only), with a permanent Viewboard audit of every command an agent ran and who approved it. Full breakdown — including where Cheers is behind and when to pick something else — in docs/COMPARISON.md.

Documentation

English is the default documentation language. Chinese mirrors use the .zh-CN.md suffix.

User and operations docs

• Documentation Home / 中文
• Deployment Guide (source · Docker Compose · Helm/K8s) / 中文
• User Manual / 中文
• User Guide / 中文
• Admin Guide / 中文
• Docker Compose Deployment Guide / 中文
• Installation Guide (legacy) / 中文
• Troubleshooting Q&A / 中文
• Agent Bridge Integration Guide / 中文 — ACP local agents are the recommended path; OpenClaw links are legacy/deprecated.
• RustFS Object Storage Guide / 中文

Development and architecture docs

• Roadmap / 中文
• Competitive Comparison — how Cheers compares to other AI-collaboration projects
• Architecture Overview
• Mesh Rework Plan
• Gateway Protocol
• Bot Permission & Trust
• Gateway Architecture
• ACP Connection & Resource Protocols / docs/arch/AGENT_BRIDGE_RESOURCE.md
• ACP Connector config.toml — Full Reference / 中文 — every bot TOML key, default, and a Codex example
• Unified Architecture Index / 中文

Stack

• Backend: Rust gateway (Axum + SQLx) — the only backend service
• Frontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Vite
• Agents: external ACP agents (OpenCode, Claude, Codex) via cheers-mcp-server and ACP connectors
• Storage: PostgreSQL for business data and channel history, S3-compatible object storage for files
• Preview: built into the gateway (GET /files/:id/preview); office→PDF conversion via optional Gotenberg
• Voice: optional speech-to-text transcription of audio via an OpenAI-compatible (Whisper) endpoint, configured at runtime in admin settings
• Deployment: Docker Compose (single host) or Kubernetes via the Helm chart in deploy/helm/cheers

Deployment

Cheers runs three ways — see the Deployment Guide for all three:

1. From source — cargo run + npm run dev with backing services in Docker (development).
2. Docker Compose — one host, all containers (self-hosting, demos). Quick Start below.
3. Helm / Kubernetes — cluster workloads (production, scale-out); chart in deploy/helm/cheers.

Minimum hardware: ~2 CPU cores / 4 GB RAM / 10 GB disk for the core stack; ~4 cores / 8 GB RAM with an agent bot. These match the resource limits shipped in docker-compose.yml.template and values-dev.yaml.

Quick Start

cp docker-compose.yml.template docker-compose.yml
cp .env.example .env

# Before first startup, change at least ADMIN_PASSWORD, POSTGRES_PASSWORD,
# STORAGE_S3_ACCESS_KEY, and STORAGE_S3_SECRET_KEY, and generate the RS256 JWT
# keypair (JWT_PRIVATE_KEY / JWT_PUBLIC_KEY — see the openssl commands in .env.example).
docker compose up -d

Default local endpoints:

• Frontend: http://localhost
• API: http://localhost:8000
• Health check: http://localhost:8000/health

Document preview (office→PDF) uses the bundled Gotenberg service and needs no extra configuration. Never use .env.example secrets in production.

Local Development

cp docker-compose.yml.template docker-compose.yml
cp .env.example .env

# Edit .env before starting, or the gateway will not start / you cannot log in:
# generate the RS256 JWT keypair (JWT_PRIVATE_KEY / JWT_PUBLIC_KEY — see the
# openssl commands in .env.example), set ADMIN_PASSWORD and the change-me
# passwords, and set STORAGE_S3_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:9000 for a host-run
# gateway. Details: docs/help/deployment.md (Method 1).
docker compose up -d postgres redis rustfs gotenberg

# Rust gateway (runs sqlx migrations on startup)
cd server
cargo run

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Bots

The platform is external-agent-first: there is no built-in bot (the old Coordinator is gone — routing is a deterministic @mention → bot lookup). Connect an external ACP agent (OpenCode, Claude, Codex) via packages/cheers-mcp-server or an ACP connector, then @ it in a channel. See docs/arch/BUILTIN_AGENT.md and docs/arch/DECENTRALIZED_MESH.md. Default seed data for the gateway is being re-established.

Contributing

Read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request.

• Work branches must target develop.
• main only accepts merges from develop.
• Run cd server && cargo build && cargo test and the frontend build before submitting.
• Report security issues privately according to SECURITY.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Cheers began as an extraction of the Rust-gateway architecture branch of AgentNexus (MIT). The original copyright notice is preserved in LICENSE.