Help Center

A help center is a public site, served by Libredesk, where customers browse and search your articles. You can run more than one. Each has its own content, languages, appearance and domain. Published articles can also be used by the AI assistant to answer conversations.

Create a help center

Add the help center

Go to Admin → Help center → New help center. Fill in the name and the slug that goes in its URL.

Pick a layout

Docs gives you a documentation layout: a top navigation bar, a sidebar listing collections, and quick search on Ctrl+K. Classic gives you a landing page with a hero banner, a large search bar and collection cards.

URLs

By default the help center is served from your Libredesk instance:

https://support.example.com/hc/<slug>/<locale>
https://support.example.com/hc/<slug>/<locale>/collections/<collection-slug>
https://support.example.com/hc/<slug>/<locale>/articles/<article-slug>

Custom domain

A help center can be served from its own domain or subdomain, for example https://help.example.com, where it sits at the root and the paths above drop the /hc/<slug> prefix. Two help centers cannot share a domain. Set Custom domain to the domain’s root URL in the help center’s settings, then:

Point DNS at the server

Point the domain at the same server as your Libredesk instance: an A record to its IP, or a CNAME to the hostname you already serve Libredesk on.

Add a server block

Libredesk decides which help center to serve from the Host header of the request, so the proxy has to forward the original host. Save this as /etc/nginx/sites-available/libredesk-help:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name help.example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:9000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Client-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

Then enable it and reload nginx:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/libredesk-help /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

proxy_set_header Host $host; is the line that matters. Without it nginx sends the upstream’s host, no help center matches, and visitors land on the agent login page instead of your help center.

Collections and articles

Collections group articles and can be nested up to three levels deep. To change the order readers see, drag a row by its handle in the content tree. Only published articles appear on the public site, and Preview shows a draft the way its public page will look.

Languages

Add every language you plan to write in under Supported languages, then pick the Default language that visitors land on. A language picker appears in the navigation bar once there is more than one. A collection or article belongs to a single language, and an article has to sit in a collection of the same language. A language that still has collections or articles in it cannot be removed.

AI answers

On any article the AI assistant may answer from, turn on Allow AI assistants to use this article. Nothing happens until the article is published. Enable it in one language only, not in every translation. AI has to be configured for this to work, see AI.

Appearance

Customize covers the logo, favicon, accent colour, header and hero, announcement bar, navigation and footer links, and what the landing and article pages show. For anything the settings do not cover, Custom code takes custom CSS and JS, injected into every page.

SEO

Set the page title and meta description for the home page, and the meta fields on each article. Libredesk serves /robots.txt and a sitemap index at /sitemap.xml, plus a per-language sitemap at /hc/<slug>/<locale>/sitemap.xml. Both are scoped to the host that asked for them, so a custom domain only advertises its own help center.

Search insights

Search insights lists the top searches visitors ran and the ones that came back empty, which is where you find the articles you are missing.

Permissions

Managing help centers, collections and articles needs the Manage help centers permission, which you add to a role under Admin → Roles.

Introduction

Getting Started

Configuration

Roles

Contributing

Create a help center

URLs

Custom domain

Collections and articles

Languages

AI answers

Appearance

SEO

Search insights

Permissions

​Create a help center

​URLs

​Custom domain

​Collections and articles

​Languages

​AI answers

​Appearance

​SEO

​Search insights

​Permissions

Create a help center

URLs

Custom domain

Collections and articles

Languages

AI answers

Appearance

SEO

Search insights

Permissions