Host Chobble Tickets for others
Chobble Tickets is designed so that anyone with some technical knowledge can run it for the event organisers they know. More hosts means a genuinely decentralised alternative to the big ticketing platforms.
Why decentralised hosting matters
The big ticketing platforms are centralised. One company runs the infrastructure, holds the data, and sets the terms. If they change their pricing or policies, every organiser on the platform is affected at once.
Chobble Tickets works differently. The code is open source and the system is built so that many different people can run it independently. Each host serves the organisers they know personally. No single point of control, no single company that can change the rules for everyone.
This is not an accident of the design. It is the design. A real alternative to Eventbrite and the rest cannot be another centralised platform. It has to be software that many people run.
Run a hosting platform
If you are comfortable with web services and APIs, you can run a hosting platform that creates and manages ticketing sites for your customers.
The way this works: you set up an account on Bunny.net (the cloud platform that Chobble Tickets runs on) and configure a few account-level settings. Once that is done, the platform has a built-in tool that creates new ticketing sites automatically. Each site gets its own database, its own encryption key, and its own web address.
When you create a new site through the platform, it:
- Downloads the latest release of Chobble Tickets from GitHub
- Creates a new server on Bunny's network
- Sets up the database connection and generates a fresh encryption key
- Copies your shared settings across (your email provider, image storage, and wallet pass configuration)
- Publishes the site live
The whole process takes a few seconds once your account is configured.
You can charge your customers whatever you like for hosting. Chobble charges £50/year with no per-ticket fees, but that is one choice among many. You might charge more, less, or nothing at all.
At the moment, one step in the setup requires manual clicking: creating the database for each new site in the Bunny dashboard. Bunny's database product is still in beta and does not yet have a public API. Once it does, the entire flow from "organiser signs up" to "site is live" will be fully automatic with no manual steps.
Host a single site
If you want to run one ticketing site for yourself or for someone you know, you do not need the full hosting platform. You can deploy a single instance using the project's GitHub Action.
The steps are:
- Fork the Chobble Tickets repository on GitHub
- Create a database and an edge script in the Bunny dashboard
- Add your Bunny credentials as secrets in your GitHub repository
- Push to the main branch
The GitHub Action builds the code and deploys it to Bunny automatically on every push. The database sets itself up on the first request. You then visit the site and set your admin password.
You can also deploy with Docker, or use one-click deploy buttons for DigitalOcean, Heroku, Koyeb, Render, and Fly.io. The README has full instructions for each option.
Because you control the fork, you choose when to pull in updates from the main project. No update reaches your site without your approval.
What hosts share, and what they control
Every host runs the same open source code. Chobble does not have a special version with extra features. The hosted version at tix.chobble.com and the code on GitHub are identical.
Each host controls:
- Pricing -- what to charge customers, if anything
- Infrastructure -- which Bunny account, which region, which plan
- Email -- which email provider sends confirmations (Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, or Mailgun)
- Updates -- when to deploy new versions of the software
- Support -- how to help the organisers they host for
Attendee data is encrypted and stays in each site's own database. Hosts cannot read their customers' attendee data. The encryption key is generated per site and only the site's admin can decrypt it.
Getting started
To run a hosting platform, you need a Bunny.net account and some familiarity with APIs and environment variables. The technical documentation covers the configuration in detail.
To host a single site, follow the deployment instructions in the README on GitHub. The recommended path is forking the repository and deploying via GitHub Actions.
If you have questions about hosting, open an issue on the GitHub repository.