90n45-d3v / mercury

Web-Based Communication System

Mercury is a DIY communication system. It acts as a web-based group chat. The project is open source and can be hosted at home on a Raspberry Pi or at an online hosting service of your choice.

Under early development...

Installation on a (home-)server

For the following instructions: Keep in mind, that Mercury got it's normal messaging functions on one website and an adminpanel on the other. These two should be hosted on seperated ports. With this structure, you will be able, to forward both websites to the internet for access from everywhere (less secure, but you can get admin privileges from everywhere) or hide the adminpanel behind a local network to get an extra layer of security.

Quik run with PHP's developer server

Mercury (Port usually: 443, 80)

cd mercury/root
php -S <LOCAL IP-ADDRESS>:<PORT>

Mercury's Admin-Panel (Port could be: 8080, 8888, 1741)

cd mercury/admin/root
php -S <LOCAL IP-ADDRESS>:<PORT>

PHP's built-in webserver may have (security-)issues and is not intended to be a full-featured web server.

1. Install a web server of your choice and PHP

Popular servers:

• Apache2
• Nginx

PHP (Version 8 or above)

• Homepage

2. Download this repository

• With Git from terminal

git clone https://github.com/90N45-d3v/Mercury

• From the webpage: <> Code --> local --> Download ZIP

3. Setup up your webserver with Apache2, Nginx...

• Set 777 file permission to raw_msgs.txt, admin/token.txt, admin/pwd.txt, admin/blacklist.txt, admin/Logs/fail_login.csv and admin/Logs/success_login.csv (chmod 777 <FILE>)
• Set 777 folder permission to user (chmod 777 <FOLDER>)
• Enable PHP on web-server

  For Mercury

• Change root directory in web-server config to mercury/root
• Configure a HTTP(-S) port for the webserver to run Mercury on
• (A SSL or TLS certificate should be configured)

  For Mercury's Admin-Panel

• Change root directory in second web-server config to mercury/admin/root
• Configure an arbitrary port for the webserver to run Mercury's Admin-Panel on

4. Configure last things and start your webserver

• Just as your choosen webserver describes it

5. Mercury's default admin password (Password should be changed quickly) (New users can be created on the admin's dashboard)

• Password: mercury

Keep in mind, that if you want to communicate over WAN (Not only in your own local network) and you are hosting Mercury at home, you need to do Port-Forwarding (Tutorial)