Retros where everyone writes first and reads later.

thoughts is a self-hosted retrospective board for teams. Everyone writes on their own, nobody can read anyone else's notes until the room moves on, and the retro ends with actions that the team's next retro opens with. It's one small Docker image with SQLite inside, so there's nothing else to run.

What it does

• Reflect, group, vote, discuss. Notes stay hidden, author and all, until everyone moves on. Then they're grouped by dragging, or by keyboard, and voted on with votes that stack like dot stickers. Discussion takes the groups in order of votes.
• Actions that don't get lost. A team's next retro opens with what the last one left unfinished: tick it off, carry it over or drop it.
• Run the room together. A shared timer, an "I'm done" count, and a spotlight that brings everyone to the group being discussed. There's no host: anyone can do anything.
• Keys for the common things. [ ] between stages, a for an action, t for the timer. ? lists them, ⌘K finds anything else.
• Sign in your way. With just a name (the default, as in v1), your directory over LDAP with no service account, or any OpenID Connect provider.
• AI if you want it. Columns for a theme, suggested groups and names, drafted actions and a recap, from Anthropic, OpenAI, any OpenAI-compatible server, or GitHub Copilot. Suggestions change nothing until someone applies them, and the model never sees who wrote what.
• Markdown export, GIFs and images on notes, light and dark.

Run it

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v "$PWD/data:/data" ghcr.io/ellgreen/thoughts:2

Then open http://localhost:3000. Everything thoughts keeps is in /data/thoughts.sqlite; back up that file.

Binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows are on the releases page if you'd rather not use Docker.

Upgrading from v1

Change the tag to 2 and restart. v2 copies your v1 database, converts it in one go, and keeps your links and sessions working. docs/upgrading.md has the details, and how to go back.

Settings

All settings are environment variables. The common ones:

Variable	Default
THOUGHTS_ADDRESS	localhost:3000 (:3000 in Docker)	Where to listen
THOUGHTS_DATA_PATH	./data (/data in Docker)	Where the database lives
THOUGHTS_TLS_CERT_PATH, THOUGHTS_TLS_KEY_PATH	unset	Serve HTTPS directly
THOUGHTS_AUTH	name	Ways to sign in: any of name, ldap, oidc, in order
THOUGHTS_PUBLIC_URL	unset	Where people open thoughts; needed for OIDC
THOUGHTS_AI_DRIVER	unset	anthropic, openai, openai-compatible or copilot
THOUGHTS_GIF_API_KEY	unset	Turns on GIF search (Klipy by default; THOUGHTS_GIF_PROVIDER=giphy for Giphy). Pasting an image link works without it
THOUGHTS_LOG_FORMAT	text (json in Docker)

More in docs/sign-in.md (LDAP, OIDC) and docs/ai.md (AI drivers and what the model sees).

Develop

You need Go, Node and pnpm, and Task.

task dev           # the API on :3000, rebuilt on change
pnpm --dir ui dev  # the UI on :5173, proxying to the API
task check         # everything CI runs

CLAUDE.md describes how the code is laid out and the rules it follows; docs/ holds the design, decisions and roadmap.

Licence

GPL-3.0. See COPYING.