Introduction | Octarq

A self-hosted back office for link management, custom email routing, and DNS management in a single Go binary.

Octarq is a single Go binary that provides short links, email routing, and DNS management with an embedded administration dashboard. It runs from a single Docker container with no external database or message queue required.

:::note Octarq is an open-source project licensed under the MIT License. You will see octarq binaries and oct_* API tokens throughout the documentation—this represents the core system. :::

Features

Core Capabilities (MIT): Short links with analytics, inbound and outbound custom email routing, DNS management, API tokens, Webhooks, and built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server support.
Plugin Architecture: Extend Octarq by adding community or custom plugins written in Go and React without forking the codebase.

Architecture

browser → host router
   ├─ /api/v1/* → JSON API (auth, links, domains, mailboxes, emails)
   ├─ /admin/*  → embedded React dashboard (SPA)
   └─ /{slug}   → 302 redirect + async click event
GORM ─ SQLite (pure-Go, default) or Postgres
DNS  ─ provider interface (Cloudflare, DNSPod)
Mail ─ Cloudflare Email Routing inbound + SMTP send

Continue to the Quick start.