Generic deployment documentation

Getting help

If you run into any problems while setting up conduwuit, ask us in #conduwuit:puppygock.gay or open an issue on GitHub.

Installing conduwuit

You may simply download the binary that fits your machine. Run uname -m to see what you need.

Prebuilt binaries can be downloaded from the latest tagged release here.

The latest tagged release also includes the Debian packages.

Alternatively, you may compile the binary yourself. We recommend using Lix to build conduwuit as this has the most guaranteed reproducibiltiy and easiest to get a build environment and output going.

Otherwise, follow standard Rust project build guides (installing git and cloning the repo, getting the Rust toolchain via rustup, installing LLVM toolchain + libclang, installing liburing for io_uring and RocksDB, etc).

Adding a conduwuit user

While conduwuit can run as any user it is better to use dedicated users for different services. This also allows you to make sure that the file permissions are correctly set up.

In Debian or RHEL, you can use this command to create a conduwuit user:

sudo adduser --system conduwuit --group --disabled-login --no-create-home

For distros without adduser:

sudo useradd -r --shell /usr/bin/nologin --no-create-home conduwuit

Forwarding ports in the firewall or the router

conduwuit uses the ports 443 and 8448 both of which need to be open in the firewall.

If conduwuit runs behind a router or in a container and has a different public IP address than the host system these public ports need to be forwarded directly or indirectly to the port mentioned in the config.

Setting up a systemd service

The systemd unit for conduwuit can be found here. You may need to change the ExecStart= path to where you placed the conduwuit binary.

Creating the conduwuit configuration file

Now we need to create the conduwuit's config file in /etc/conduwuit/conduwuit.toml. The example config can be found at conduwuit-example.toml.Please take a moment to read it. You need to change at least the server name.

RocksDB (rocksdb) is the only supported database backend. SQLite only exists for historical reasons and is not recommended. Any performance issues, storage issues, database issues, etc will not be assisted if using SQLite and you will be asked to migrate to RocksDB first.

Setting the correct file permissions

If you are using a dedicated user for conduwuit, you will need to allow it to read the config. To do that you can run this command on

Debian or RHEL:

sudo chown -R root:root /etc/conduwuit
sudo chmod 755 /etc/conduwuit

If you use the default database path you also need to run this:

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/conduwuit/
sudo chown -R conduwuit:conduwuit /var/lib/conduwuit/
sudo chmod 700 /var/lib/conduwuit/

Setting up the Reverse Proxy

Refer to the documentation or various guides online of your chosen reverse proxy software. A Caddy example will be provided as this is the recommended reverse proxy for new users and is very trivial to use (handles TLS, reverse proxy headers, etc transparently with proper defaults).

Caddy

Create /etc/caddy/conf.d/conduwuit_caddyfile and enter this (substitute for your server name).

your.server.name, your.server.name:8448 {
        # TCP
        reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:6167

        # UNIX socket
        #reverse_proxy unix//run/conduwuit/conduwuit.sock
}

That's it! Just start and enable the service and you're set.

$ sudo systemctl enable --now caddy

You're done!

Now you can start conduwuit with:

$ sudo systemctl start conduwuit

Set it to start automatically when your system boots with:

$ sudo systemctl enable conduwuit

How do I know it works?

You can open a Matrix client, enter your homeserver and try to register.

You can also use these commands as a quick health check.

$ curl https://your.server.name/_conduwuit/server_version

# If using port 8448
$ curl https://your.server.name:8448/_conduwuit/server_version

To check if your server can talk with other homeservers, you can use the Matrix Federation Tester. If you can register but cannot join federated rooms check your config again and also check if the port 8448 is open and forwarded correctly.

conduwuit