Self-hosted planning poker your team joins with a link

Most tools want an account. Parley wants a link.

Same link for planning poker and standup. Two commands and a .env file, no platform team required:

Compose

git clone https://github.com/lets-parley/parley && cd parley
cp .env.example .env        # set POSTGRES_PASSWORD to anything
docker compose up -d

That is the whole install, and it is on :8080. Compose binds to localhost until you say otherwise. docker compose ps reports healthy once Parley can reach Postgres.

One server

Compose, a domain, and a reverse proxy in front — one box your whole team points at, no cluster. Parley is one process and a database, so this is the shape it is built for, and a small cloud instance carries a team of a few dozen. Check it through the proxy your team will use: curl -fsS https://parley.example.com/readyz. One server

Prebuilt image

docker run -d --name parley -p 8080:8080 \
  -e DATABASE_URL='postgres://parley:secret@db:5432/parley?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/etc/ssl/certs/ca.pem' \
  -e BASE_URL='https://parley.example.com' \
  ghcr.io/lets-parley/parley:0.10.0

Multi-arch, amd64 and arm64. Bring your own Postgres. v0.10.0 is the current release, and v0.2.2 is the security floor: every earlier release can be crashed remotely by a disconnecting client, and v0.1.0 additionally has a room-code throttle bypass. None were retagged onto fixed code.

curl -fsS http://localhost:8080/readyz answers ok when it is ready. A 503 says which half is unhappy: database unreachable, or not listening for session changes — this replica is serving, but has stopped hearing the others.

Kubernetes

The Helm chart, or the plain manifests in deploy/k8s/ — a Deployment, a Service, and a commented Ingress carrying the ingress-nginx read-timeout annotations WebSockets need — other controllers ignore those and need their own setting. (No PodDisruptionBudget there; the chart adds one.) One replica by default; scale up with --set replicaCount=2 on chart 0.4.1 or newer — earlier charts refuse more than one replica at render time. The readiness probe is /readyz, so a pod only goes Ready once it can reach Postgres and hear the other replicas: kubectl rollout status deploy/parley. Deploying to Kubernetes

Helm

kubectl create secret generic parley \
  --from-literal=database-url='postgres://parley:secret@host:5432/parley'

helm install parley oci://ghcr.io/lets-parley/charts/parley --version 0.10.0 \
  --set database.existingSecret=parley \
  --set baseURL=https://parley.example.com

Pin --version. The chart refuses to render a release that cannot work — a moving image tag, a fractional replica count, a missing database secret. Watch it come up with kubectl rollout status deploy/parley. The chart

The frontend ships inside the binary, so there is no second service, no Node runtime in production, and no way for the two halves to end up at different versions. Migrations run themselves at boot.

The things it does not do are on one page too, each with its workaround: known limitations.

The first screen, and the whole sign-up

There is no account step to show, because there isn’t one. Name a space and you are in it; everyone else follows the link you paste into chat.

A round resolving, and one field. The cards deal and turn over once when the page loads, then rest on the number the room agreed — the product doing the thing the page is describing.

What a round looks like

Everyone votes at once, and nobody sees a number until the round opens. Your teammates don’t install anything and don’t sign up for anything — they open the link and type a name.

Mid-round: the count reads 4 of 6. Everyone else's values are not merely hidden in your browser — the server leaves them out of what it sends you, so the only value on your machine is your own.

Revealed. A T-shirt round reports mode and range, because averaging sizes gives you a number nobody can act on.

What’s in it

Planning poker

A story queue with real ticket references. Four built-in decks — Fibonacci, modified Fibonacci, T-shirt, powers of two — each carrying ? and a coffee card, plus any deck a space saves of its own.

What it does

Daily standup

Round-robin with a 90-second clock, so the quiet people get their turn. Whatever you wrote under “today” is waiting under “yesterday” tomorrow, and blockers collect into a list you can paste into a channel.

What it does

Spaces

One memorable link per team, /o/acme/s/platform-team, and a six-character room code that throttles wrong guesses per address. The roster shows who is here and which table they are sitting at.

What it does

Guest links

One URL that seats one person in one room, for 24 hours — no account, no space membership, and nothing else it can reach. Revoke it and whoever redeemed it is out of the room in seconds.

What it does

What Parley doesn’t do

• No metrics, tracing or access log. JSON logs to stdout are all it emits; probe /readyz and take request metrics from your reverse proxy. LOG_LEVEL=debug adds one line per request with the resolved client address and forwarding chain, for diagnosing a proxy — it is not an access log and is not retained. Releases do ship an SPDX SBOM and digest-bound build provenance; see Supply chain.
• No roles beyond owner, member, and facilitator. The owner role gates only member management — any member can still rotate the passcode or open the space. Keep membership deliberate, or put an SSO proxy in front of it.
• Turning on OIDC signs everyone out. Anonymous accounts are not linked to federated ones. Switch on an instance whose history you are willing to leave behind.

All of them are on one page, each with its workaround, because the gaps are the reason to believe the rest.

Known limitations

In production

• A Postgres blip does not restart the container and drop every socket in the room — the health check never touches the database
• The container is distroless and non-root, no shell, one static binary — amd64 and arm64
• CSV exports cannot run formulas in your spreadsheet, and never contain a vote you were not allowed to see

OperationsArchitecture, deployment on one box or a cluster, backups, upgrades, and a runbook keyed by symptom.

SecurityThreat model, authentication, authorization, data and privacy, and a single-page review pack.

Threat modelWhat Parley assumes about its attacker, what it defends, and what it deliberately leaves to the network in front of it.

The official Parley project is letsparley.io. The MIT license covers the code, not the name.