fly-apps/dendrite

Matrix Homeserver on fly.io

Quick notes on how to run dendrite for a small scale Matrix homeserver on fly.io with sqlite storage.

Requirements

• A domain name where you can create/change A, AAAA and SRV records
• A fly.io account and the flyctl cli installed
• Docker or similar container runtime installed

Preparations

For federation (talking to other homeservers), your server needs is a matrix server key.

To generate this server key, the dendrite container image can be used.

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/key -w /key --entrypoint /usr/bin/generate-keys matrixdotorg/dendrite-monolith:v0.3.11 --private-key matrix_key.pem

Do not loose this key!

Next, make copy the dendrite-example.yaml to dentrite.yaml and change the global.server_name to your desired domain.

Finally, change the app = "dendrite-on-fly" line in fly.toml to an app name of your desire.

Deployment

The deployment is using a persistent volume mount, so we need to create the volume before we can deploy.

The following command will create a 10 GB volume in the fra region. (A list of available regions can be obtained using flyctl platform regions)

flyctl volumes create dendrite_data --region fra --size 10

Now you simply can deploy dendrite using

flyctl deploy

Domain configuration

After deployment, execute flyctl info to obtain the IP addresses your app runs on.

Use these IPs to create A and AAAA records for the domain name you configured in dendrite.yaml

Usually matrix federates on port 8448, but it is possible to use a SRV record to specify a different port (8443 in our case).

Create a SRV record at _matrix._tcp.<the-original-domain> with values 10 10 8443 <the-original-domain>

It is possible to test federation with the Matrix federation tester.

Once you have set up the A and AAAA records, obtain a TLS certificate using flyctl

flyctl certs add <hostname>

You now can create accounts on your homeserver and start chatting with people.

Still to figure out

• How to backup your sqlite file

Useful information

• flyctl v0.0.181 and dendrite v0.3.11 were used