What it is

Easy!Appointments is a free, open-source, self-hosted appointment scheduling platform written in PHP and released under the GPL-3.0 license. It runs on the CodeIgniter framework with a MySQL database and a JavaScript front end, and it is distributed through the project's GitHub repository at alextselegidis/easyappointments. The application is designed to adapt to a business rather than force a business to adapt to it, covering both simple appointment booking and more advanced scheduling logic.

The concrete problem it solves is ownership of the booking workflow. Commercial scheduling services host customer data on the vendor's infrastructure and charge for access, while Easy!Appointments is deployed on infrastructure the operator controls, so appointment records, customer details, and provider schedules stay in the operator's own database. It also integrates with an existing website and database, which means a business can add booking to a site it already runs instead of adopting a separate hosted platform.

Key capabilities

• Appointment and customer management, covering the booking records themselves and the people attached to them.
• Service and provider organization, so multiple offerings and multiple staff members can be modeled separately.
• Working plans and booking rules that define when each provider is available.
• Google Calendar synchronization for pushing scheduled appointments into an existing calendar.
• An email notification system for communicating booking events.
• A multi-language interface for deployments serving more than one language.
• A REST API, listed among the repository topics, for programmatic access to the scheduling data.

Who uses it and how

• Businesses that want booking embedded in an existing website while keeping the underlying data in their own database.
• Service providers who need to define distinct services, assign them to specific staff, and constrain availability through working plans and booking rules.
• Teams already standardized on Google Calendar that want appointments to appear there automatically through synchronization.
• Operators with privacy or compliance requirements who prefer self-hosted deployment over a hosted scheduling service.
• Developers who need to read or write scheduling data programmatically through the REST API.

Getting started

For development, the repository ships a Docker Compose environment: clone the repository, run docker compose up, then docker compose exec app bash and run npm install && composer install, followed by npm start for the development watcher or npm run build for production assets. For production, the README requires Apache or Nginx, PHP 8.2 or later, and a MySQL database; the operator uploads the easyappointments folder, makes the storage directory writable, renames config-sample.php to config.php, updates the configuration values, and completes the setup wizard in the browser.

When to use it — and when not to

Easy!Appointments is a reasonable choice when self-hosting and data control matter more than a managed service, and the project points to premium features and professional services at easyappointments.org/premium for capabilities beyond the open-source core. A self-hoster must operate a web server, PHP 8.2 or later, a MySQL database, a writable storage directory, and the email notification system, so the operational burden is real. The repository also carries 164 open issues, which is worth weighing before committing to it for a production booking flow.

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/alextselegidis/easyappointments.git

# Navigate into the project
cd easyappointments

# Start the Docker environment
docker compose up

docker compose exec app bash

npm install && composer install

npm start

npm run build