Publish your help center

Your installation includes a fast, server-rendered public help center (helpin-helpcenter, port 8086). You can serve it on its own hostname, like help.example.com, or under a path on your main website, like example.com/docs.

Preview locally

Create a help center in Docs → Help Center, publish an article, and open:

http://localhost:8086/?subdomain=YOUR_HELP_CENTER_SLUG

You'll find the slug in the help center's settings.

Option A: Its own hostname

1. Point a DNS record for help.example.com at your server.

2. Route it to the help center in your reverse proxy:

help.example.com {
    encode zstd gzip
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8086
}

3. In Helpin, open the help center's settings, choose Custom domain, and enter help.example.com.

helpin install --mode server asks for this hostname and writes the proxy block for you.

Option B: A path on your website

Serve the help center at https://example.com/docs so articles build SEO for your main domain. Your website's proxy forwards /docs and everything under it to the help center, and adds headers that tell Helpin which help center and path to use.

1. In the help center's settings, choose Reverse proxy, and enter the public host (example.com) and base path (/docs).

2. Add the proxy rules to your web server:

location = /docs {
  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8086/;
  proxy_set_header X-Helpin-HC-Tenant   YOUR_HELP_CENTER_SLUG;
  proxy_set_header X-Helpin-HC-Basepath /docs;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host     $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto    $scheme;
}

location /docs/ {
  rewrite ^/docs/(.*)$ /$1 break;
  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8086;
  proxy_set_header X-Helpin-HC-Tenant   YOUR_HELP_CENTER_SLUG;
  proxy_set_header X-Helpin-HC-Basepath /docs;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host     $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto    $scheme;
}

Helpin then serves every link, asset, search request, sitemap, and canonical URL under /docs. You only proxy /docs and /docs/*, never root paths like /assets or /api.

Different host? The tenant header is only trusted when the proxy connects over loopback or a private address. Run the rule on the Helpin host, or proxy through it.

Verify

• https://example.com/docs loads, and article links stay under /docs/….

• In DevTools → Network, no request goes to the site root or to the help center's own hostname.

• The page source's canonical URL starts with https://example.com/docs.

• https://example.com/docs/sitemap.xml lists your articles.

Help center AI answers

AI answers and search in the help center use your server's AI configuration. Semantic search needs an embeddings source. See AI providers & knowledge search.

Images and files

Published articles serve images from a separate public copy. Your private storage bucket is never exposed, and there's no anonymous listing.