Before you get started

Please read the FAQ before running your own server and you may want to read about additional notes relating to third-party instances.

Errata Notice

• amd64 builds are only available for backend and bonfire images currently, more to come.
• ❗ Important: if you deployed Revolt before 2022-10-29, you may have to tag the minio image release if it's configured in "fs" mode.

  image: minio/minio:RELEASE.2022-10-24T18-35-07Z

• ❗ Important: if you deployed Revolt before 2023-04-21, you may have to flush your Redis database.

  # for stock Redis and older KeyDB images:
  docker-compose exec redis redis-cli
  # ...or for newer KeyDB images:
  docker-compose exec redis keydb-cli
  
  # then run:
  FLUSHDB

• ❗ Important: configuration strategy has changed but this guide is out of date TL;DR mount Revolt.toml at /Revolt.toml for both api and events. Proper documentation will follow in due time.

Quick Start

This repository provides reasonable defaults, so you can immediately get started with it on your local machine.

Warning This is not recommended for production usage - see below for the full guide.

git clone https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted revolt
cd revolt
cp .env.example .env
docker-compose up -d

Then simply go to http://local.revolt.chat

Setup

Prerequisites before continuing:

• Docker
• Docker Compose
• Git

Clone this repository.

git clone https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted revolt
cd revolt

Copy the .env file and edit according to your needs.

Warning: The default configuration is intended for testing and only works on your local machine. If you want to deploy to a remote server, you need to edit the URLs in the .env file, please see the section below on configuring a custom domain.
If you get a network error when trying to log in, double check your configuration before opening an issue.

cp .env.example .env

Then bring up Revolt:

docker-compose up -d

Updating Revolt

Before updating Revolt, check the errata at the top for important information and check if there are any new required environment variables now present in the .env file.

To update Revolt, first pull the latest copy of this repository to ensure you have the latest tags:

git pull

Then pull all the latest images:

docker-compose pull

Now you can restart your services:

docker-compose up -d

Additional Notes

Custom domain

To configure a custom domain, you should be able to do a search and replace on local.revolt.chat in the .env file, like so:

# .env
- REVOLT_APP_URL=http://local.revolt.chat
+ REVOLT_APP_URL=http://my.domain

You will also want to change the protocols to enable HTTPS:

# .env
- REVOLT_APP_URL=http://my.domain
+ REVOLT_APP_URL=https://my.domain

- REVOLT_EXTERNAL_WS_URL=ws://my.domain/ws
+ REVOLT_EXTERNAL_WS_URL=wss://my.domain/ws

In the case of HOSTNAME, you must strip the protocol prefix:

# .env
- HOSTNAME=https://my.domain
+ HOSTNAME=my.domain

Putting Revolt behind another reverse proxy (or on a non-standard port)

Override the port definitions on caddy:

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  caddy:
    ports:
      - "1234:80"

Warning This file is not Git ignored, it may be sufficient to use an override file but that will not remove port 80 / 443 allocations.

Update the hostname used by the web server:

# .env
- HOSTNAME=http://local.revolt.chat
+ HOSTNAME=:80

You can now reverse proxy to http://localhost:1234.

Expose database

You can insecurely expose the database by adding a port definition:

# docker-compose.override.yml
services:
  database:
    ports:
      - "27017:27017"

Mongo compatibility

Older processors may not support the latest MongoDB version, you may pin to MongoDB 4.4 as such:

# docker-compose.override.yml
services:
  database:
    image: mongo:4.4

Making your instance invite-only

Enable invite-only mode by setting REVOLT_INVITE_ONLY in .env to 1

Create an invite:

# drop into mongo shell
docker-compose exec database mongosh

# create the invite
use revolt
db.invites.insertOne({ _id: "enter_an_invite_code_here" })