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

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.

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

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.