OpenWaitlist

Open-source restaurant waitlist management — inspired by Chowbus. Runs locally as a web app with a customer kiosk and staff admin interface.

Quick start

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000

Route	Purpose
/	Marketing landing page
/kiosk	Customer landing screen
/kiosk/join	Live queue + join form
/admin	Redirects to waitlist management
/admin/waitlist	Staff waitlist management

Features

Customer kiosk

• Tap-to-start landing screen
• Live waitlist display (ticket number, name, party size)
• Touch-friendly join form with numeric keypad
• Confirmation screen with auto-return countdown

Staff admin

• Waitlist sidebar with search and party-size filters
• Notify, Check In, Seat, and Cancel actions
• Add guests manually from staff side

Notifications

• Customer SMS (Telnyx): queue confirmation + table-ready texts go to the guest's phone
• Two-way SMS: guest replies appear in admin Message panel (configure Telnyx webhook — see .github/TELNYX-10DLC.md)
• Staff alerts (VoceChat): check-in, seated, and cancel updates go to VoceChat user 437225
• Set TELNYX_API_KEY and TELNYX_FROM_NUMBER in .env.local (see .env.example)
• Test SMS: set TELNYX_TEST_TO, then curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/notifications/test

Deploy on Vercel (recommended for production)

Vercel runs the full app — API, database, Telnyx SMS, and VoceChat staff alerts.

1. Create a Turso database (free)

Turso is serverless SQLite. Local file SQLite does not persist on Vercel.

# Install Turso CLI: https://docs.turso.tech/cli
turso db create openwaitlist
turso db show openwaitlist --url        # copy URL
turso db tokens create openwaitlist     # copy token

2. Deploy to Vercel

npm i -g vercel
cd openwaitlist
vercel

Or connect https://github.com/Privoce/OpenWaitlist in the Vercel dashboard.

3. Add environment variables (Vercel → Settings → Environment Variables)

Variable	Value
TURSO_DATABASE_URL	libsql://… from Turso
TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN	Turso auth token
TELNYX_API_KEY	Your Telnyx API key
TELNYX_FROM_NUMBER	Your Telnyx number in E.164 (e.g. +15551234567)
VOCECHAT_BOT_API_KEY	Your VoceChat bot key
VOCECHAT_BASE_URL	https://dev.voce.chat (optional)

Redeploy after adding env vars. Your app will be at https://your-project.vercel.app.

Local vs Vercel

	Local npm run dev	Vercel
Database	SQLite file in data/	Turso (cloud)
Telnyx SMS	.env.local	Vercel env vars
VoceChat	.env.local	Vercel env vars
GitHub Pages	—	UI demo only (localStorage)

GitHub Pages

Landing page + interactive demo: https://openwaitlist.privoce.com (after Pages is enabled)

First-time setup (required)

GitHub Pages must be enabled once or deploys will fail with a 404:

1. Open Settings → Pages
2. Set Source to GitHub Actions
3. Re-run Actions → Deploy GitHub Pages (or push to main)

See .github/ENABLE-PAGES.md for details and custom domain setup.

Future custom domain: openwaitlist.privoce.com (CNAME file included — add the domain in GitHub Pages settings, then point DNS to GitHub).

The GitHub Pages build runs in the browser with localStorage (no server). SMS and VoceChat are not available on Pages — use the Vercel deployment for full features.

Data

• Local: SQLite file at data/openwaitlist.db
• Vercel: Turso cloud database (when TURSO_* env vars are set)

Tech stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router)
• Tailwind CSS
• SQLite locally / Turso on Vercel