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

Static prebuilt binary

You may simply download the binary that fits your machine architecture (x86_64 or aarch64). Run uname -m to see what you need.

Prebuilt fully static musl binaries can be downloaded from the latest tagged release here or main CI branch workflow artifact output. These also include Debian/Ubuntu packages.

Binaries are also available on my website directly at: https://pup.systems/~strawberry/conduwuit/

These can be curl'd directly from. ci-bins are CI workflow binaries by commit hash/revision, and releases are tagged releases. Sort by descending last modified for the latest.

These binaries have jemalloc and io_uring statically linked and included with them, so no additional dynamic dependencies need to be installed.

For the best performance; if using an x86_64 CPU made in the last ~15 years, we recommend using the -haswell- optimised binaries. This sets -march=haswell which is the most compatible and highest performance with optimised binaries. The database backend, RocksDB, most benefits from this as it will then use hardware accelerated CRC32 hashing/checksumming which is critical for performance.

Compiling

Alternatively, you may compile the binary yourself. We recommend using Nix (or Lix) to build conduwuit as this has the most guaranteed reproducibiltiy and easiest to get a build environment and output going. This also allows easy cross-compilation.

You can run the nix build -L .#static-x86_64-linux-musl-all-features or nix build -L .#static-aarch64-linux-musl-all-features commands based on architecture to cross-compile the necessary static binary located at result/bin/conduwuit. This is reproducible with the static binaries produced in our CI.

If wanting to build using standard Rust toolchains, make sure you install:

liburing-dev on the compiling machine, and liburing on the target host
LLVM and libclang for RocksDB

You can build conduwuit using cargo build --release --all-features

Migrating from Conduit

As mentioned in the README, there is little to no steps needed to migrate from Conduit. As long as you are using the RocksDB database backend, just replace the binary / container image / etc.

WARNING: As of conduwuit 0.5.0, all database and backwards compatibility with Conduit is no longer supported. We only support migrating from Conduit, not back to Conduit like before. If you are truly finding yourself wanting to migrate back to Conduit, we would appreciate all your feedback and if we can assist with any issues or concerns.

Note: If you are relying on Conduit's "automatic delegation" feature, this will NOT work on conduwuit and you must configure delegation manually. This is not a mistake and no support for this feature will be added.

If you are using SQLite, you MUST migrate to RocksDB. You can use this tool to migrate from SQLite to RocksDB: https://github.com/ShadowJonathan/conduit_toolbox/

See the [global.well_known] config section, or configure your web server appropriately to send the delegation responses.

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, you can use this command to create a conduwuit user:

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

For distros without adduser (or where it's a symlink to useradd):

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

Forwarding ports in the firewall or the router

Matrix's default federation port is port 8448, and clients must be using port 443. If you would like to use only port 443, or a different port, you will need to setup delegation. conduwuit has config options for doing delegation, or you can configure your reverse proxy to manually serve the necessary JSON files to do delegation (see the [global.well_known] config section).

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.

Note for NAT users; if you have trouble connecting to your server from the inside of your network, you need to research your router and see if it supports "NAT hairpinning" or "NAT loopback".

If your router does not support this feature, you need to research doing local DNS overrides and force your Matrix DNS records to use your local IP internally. This can be done at the host level using /etc/hosts. If you need this to be on the network level, consider something like NextDNS or Pi-Hole.

Setting up a systemd service

Two example systemd units for conduwuit can be found on the configuration page. You may need to change the ExecStart= path to where you placed the conduwuit binary if it is not /usr/bin/conduwuit.

On systems where rsyslog is used alongside journald (i.e. Red Hat-based distros and OpenSUSE), put $EscapeControlCharactersOnReceive off inside /etc/rsyslog.conf to allow color in logs.

If you are using a different database_path other than the systemd unit configured default /var/lib/conduwuit, you need to add your path to the systemd unit's ReadWritePaths=. This can be done by either directly editing conduwuit.service and reloading systemd, or running systemctl edit conduwuit.service and entering the following:

[Service]
ReadWritePaths=/path/to/custom/database/path

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 the config. You need to change at least the server name.

RocksDB is the only supported database backend.

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:

sudo chown -R root:root /etc/conduwuit
sudo chmod -R 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. There are many examples of basic Apache/Nginx reverse proxy setups out there.

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).

Lighttpd is not supported as it seems to mess with the X-Matrix Authorization header, making federation non-functional. If a workaround is found, feel free to share to get it added to the documentation here.

If using Apache, you need to use nocanon in your ProxyPass directive to prevent this (note that Apache isn't very good as a general reverse proxy and we discourage the usage of it if you can).

If using Nginx, you need to give conduwuit the request URI using $request_uri, or like so:

proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:6167$request_uri;
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:6167;

Nginx users need to increase client_max_body_size (default is 1M) to match max_request_size defined in conduwuit.toml.

You will need to reverse proxy everything under following routes:

/_matrix/ - core Matrix C-S and S-S APIs
/_conduwuit/ - ad-hoc conduwuit routes such as /local_user_count and /server_version

You can optionally reverse proxy the following individual routes:

/.well-known/matrix/client and /.well-known/matrix/server if using conduwuit to perform delegation (see the [global.well_known] config section)
/.well-known/matrix/support if using conduwuit to send the homeserver admin contact and support page (formerly known as MSC1929)
/ if you would like to see hewwo from conduwuit woof! at the root

See the following spec pages for more details on these files:

Examples of delegation:

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 (replace your.server.name).

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

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

# If federation is enabled
curl https://your.server.name:8448/_matrix/federation/v1/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 🏳️‍⚧️ 💜 🦴