Escalight — self-hosted on-call escalation and paging: define who gets notified, wait, then escalate — over email, Slack, Discord, or a real push notification with an Acknowledge button on the lock screen. No per-seat fee, no phone bill, one binary.

Install • Usage • Configuration • Changelog • Contributing • License

Code of conduct • Security

Demo

The clip shows the full escalation loop: creating a service, an on-call schedule, and a two-level escalation policy, then firing a real incident at the ingest webhook and watching it page the primary on-call, escalate to the secondary responder when unacknowledged, then get acknowledged and resolved with the timeline visible throughout. Full quality: docs/assets/demo.mp4.

What it does

• Escalation policies: notify person A, wait N minutes, escalate to person B, repeat or stop — with a per-step choice of email, Slack, Discord, and/or push.
• On-call schedules: daily or weekly rotations with a two-week calendar view, plus one-off manual overrides for "Bob covers Friday instead of Alice."
• Alert ingestion from a generic JSON webhook, Prometheus Alertmanager, or an inbound email provider (Postmark, Mailgun, SendGrid) — no bespoke integration code needed for the two most common setups.
• Real push notifications: an installable PWA with web push (VAPID) — a page shows up on your phone's lock screen with the alert's actual title and an Acknowledge button that fires right from the notification, no app open required.
• Acknowledge/resolve from anywhere: the web UI, the push notification itself, or a Slack /escalight ack <id> slash command.
• An incident timeline: who was paged, when, and what they did — the minimum audit trail you need after a 3am page, not a full postmortem tool.
• One binary, one SQLite file: go build, run it, done. No Postgres, no Redis, no Node.js build step.

The schedule page: a daily/weekly rotation editor above a two-week calendar showing who's on call each day, plus manual overrides below.

Why Escalight

Opsgenie is being discontinued by Atlassian, forcing existing customers to migrate right now. PagerDuty charges $21–41/user/month (plus a ~$699/month AIOps add-on), which punishes exactly the teams growing fast enough to need real on-call discipline. The one credible free alternative, GoAlert, is actively maintained but deliberately bare-bones — no mobile push, a utilitarian UI most non-engineers bounce off. The other prior free option, Grafana OnCall, was archived in March 2026. Escalight aims to sit between GoAlert's minimalism and a full observability platform: paging that works, self-hosted, free.

Requirements

• Go 1.26+ to build from source (or use the Docker image / a release binary — no Go needed then)
• A place to run one small binary or container — no managed database, no external queue

Install

From source (the only path available today — no tagged release has been published yet, so the Docker image and release binaries below don't exist):

git clone https://github.com/Laaaaksh/escalight.git
cd escalight
go build -o escalight .
./escalight serve

Docker / release binary (coming soon): once the first tagged release ships, docker run ghcr.io/laaaaksh/escalight:latest and a binary on the Releases page will also work — see CONTRIBUTING.md for how a release is cut.

Usage

Visit http://localhost:8080 — the first run redirects you to a setup page to create an admin account. Then:

1. Create an escalation policy (Policies → New policy): who gets notified, in what order, with how long to wait between steps.

2. Create a service (Services → New service) and attach the policy — this gives you a webhook URL for a generic JSON alert, an Alertmanager-shaped webhook, and an email-in webhook.

3. Fire a test alert:

   curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/webhooks/generic/<service-webhook-key> \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"title":"disk full on db-1","description":"/var is at 98%"}'

4. Watch it show up under Incidents, get escalated per your policy, and acknowledge it from the incident page (or from a push notification, once you've enabled push in Settings).

Optionally, add a schedule (Schedules → New schedule) with a daily/weekly rotation, then point an escalation step at "On-call: <schedule name>" instead of a specific person.

Configuration

Escalight is configured entirely through environment variables — there's no config file.

Variable	Default	Purpose
ESCALIGHT_ADDR	:8080	Listen address
ESCALIGHT_BASE_URL	http://localhost:8080	Public URL, used in email/Slack/push links
ESCALIGHT_DB_PATH	escalight.db	SQLite database file path
ESCALIGHT_SMTP_HOST, _PORT, _USER, _PASS, _FROM	unset	Enable email notifications via any SMTP relay
ESCALIGHT_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL	unset	Enable Slack notifications (Incoming Webhook URL)
ESCALIGHT_SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET	unset	Verifies the /escalight slash command's requests
ESCALIGHT_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL	unset	Enable Discord notifications
ESCALIGHT_VAPID_SUBJECT	mailto:admin@localhost	Contact URL required by the Web Push protocol

Web push needs no configuration — VAPID keys are generated automatically on first boot and persisted in the database. Each user enables it for their own device from Settings.

Slack's slash command (/escalight ack <id> / /escalight resolve <id>) needs a Slack app with its Request URL set to <base-url>/integrations/slack/commands and the signing secret above configured; the incoming-webhook notifications work with just the webhook URL, no app needed.

See docs/EMAIL_INTEGRATION.md for wiring up email-to-alert with Postmark, Mailgun, or SendGrid.

Limitations

Escalight is v1 and self-hosted first. Known gaps, stated plainly rather than discovered the hard way:

• No release artifacts yet. No tagged release exists, so the Docker image and prebuilt binaries don't exist — building from source is the only install path today. See Install.
• Schedules are UTC-only. Rotation and override times don't convert per user or per schedule timezone yet, even though a Timezone field exists on schedules for the future.
• No SMS or voice paging. Those need a paid telephony provider (Twilio et al.), which would break the no-per-seat-fee premise — out of scope for v1, not silently assumed.
• Session-cookie auth only. Email+password, no SSO/OAuth/SAML — a deliberate v1 cut to spend the available time on the escalation engine and notification channels instead.
• No native mobile app. The installable PWA delivers real lock-screen push notifications with an Acknowledge button, but there's no App Store/Play Store app.
• No postmortem or retrospective tooling. The incident timeline is an audit trail of who was paged and what they did — not a postmortem document, template, or report generator.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the build/test/PR workflow.

Security

See SECURITY.md for supported versions and how to report a vulnerability privately.

Star this repo

If Escalight is useful to you, star it — it helps others evaluating a PagerDuty/Opsgenie replacement find it.

License

MIT