Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation

Welcome to the repository for the official Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server). This repository includes container images and documentation designed to assist technical people with hosting a Bluesky PDS.

Head over to the AT Protocol PDS Admins Discord to chat with other folks hosting instances and get important updates about the PDS distribution!

• FAQ
  • What is Bluesky?
  • What is AT Protocol?
  • Where is the code?
  • What is the current status of federation?
• Self-hosting PDS
  • Preparation for self-hosting PDS
  • Open your cloud firewall for HTTP and HTTPS
  • Configure DNS for your domain
  • Check that DNS is working as expected
  • Installer on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 and Debian 11/12
  • Verifying that your PDS is online and accessible
  • Creating an account using pdsadmin
  • Creating an account using an invite code
  • Using the Bluesky app with your PDS
  • Setting up SMTP
  • Updating your PDS

Bluesky is a social media application built on AT Protocol.

Please visit the Bluesky website for more information.

The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a protocol for large-scale distributed social applications.

Please visit the AT Protocol docs for additional information.

• TypeScript code
• Go code

As of Spring 2024, the AT Protocol network is open to federation!

✅ Federated domain handles (e.g. @nytimes.com)

✅ Federated feed generators (custom algorithms)

✅ Federated relays (event firehose)

✅ Federated app views (API service)

✅ Federated data (PDS hosting)

✅ Federated moderation (labeling)

Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal Data Server that is capable of federating with the wider Bluesky social network.

Launch a server on any cloud provider, Digital Ocean and Vultr are two popular choices.

Ensure that you can ssh to your server and have root access.

Server Requirements

• Public IPv4 address
• Public DNS name
• Public inbound internet access permitted on port 80/tcp and 443/tcp

Server Recommendations

Note: It is a good security practice to restrict inbound ssh access (port 22/tcp) to your own computer's public IP address. You can check your current public IP address using ifconfig.me.

One of the most common sources of misconfiguration is not opening firewall ports correctly. Please be sure to double check this step.

In your cloud provider's console, the following ports should be open to inbound access from the public internet.

• 80/tcp (Used only for TLS certification verification)
• 443/tcp (Used for all application requests)

Note: there is no need to set up TLS or redirect requests from port 80 to 443 because the Caddy web server, included in the Docker compose file, will handle this for you.

From your DNS provider's control panel, set up a domain with records pointing to your server.

Note:

• Replace example.com with your domain name.
• Replace 12.34.56.78 with your server's IP address.
• Some providers may use the @ symbol to represent the root of your domain.
• The wildcard record is required when allowing users to create new accounts on your PDS.
• The TTL can be anything but 600 (10 minutes) is reasonable

Use a service like DNS Checker to verify that you can resolve domain names.

Examples to check (record type A):

• example.com
• random.example.com
• test123.example.com

These should all return your server's public IP.

On your server via ssh, download the installer script using wget:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bluesky-social/pds/main/installer.sh

or download it using curl:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bluesky-social/pds/main/installer.sh >installer.sh

And then run the installer using bash:

sudo bash installer.sh

You can check if your server is online and healthy by requesting the healthcheck endpoint.

You can visit https://example.com/xrpc/_health in your browser. You should see a JSON response with a version, like:

{"version":"0.2.2-beta.2"}

You'll also need to check that WebSockets are working, for the rest of the network to pick up content from your PDS. You can test by installing a tool like wsdump and running a command like:

wsdump "wss://example.com/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos?cursor=0"

Note that there will be no events output on the WebSocket until they are created in the PDS, so the above command may continue to run with no output if things are configured successfully.

Using ssh on your server, use pdsadmin to create an account if you haven't already.

sudo pdsadmin account create

Using ssh on your server, use pdsadmin to create an invite code.

sudo pdsadmin create-invite-code

When creating an account using the app, enter this invite code.

You can use the Bluesky app to connect to your PDS.

1. Get the Bluesky app
   • Bluesky for Web
   • Bluesky for iPhone
   • Bluesky for Android
2. Enter the URL of your PDS (e.g. https://example.com/)

Note: because the subdomain TLS certificate is created on-demand, it may take 10-30s for your handle to be accessible. If you aren't seeing your first post/profile, wait 30s and try to make another post.

To be able to verify users' email addresses and send other emails, you need to set up an SMTP server.

One way to do this is to use an email service. Resend and SendGrid are two popular choices.

Create an account and API key on an email service, ensure your server allows access on the required ports, and set these variables in /pds/pds.env (example with Resend):

PDS_EMAIL_SMTP_URL=smtps://resend:<your api key here>@smtp.resend.com:465/
PDS_EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=admin@your.domain

Note: Your PDS will need to be restarted with those variables. This varies depending on your setup. If you followed this installation guide, run systemctl restart pds. You might need to restart the server or recreate the container, depending on what you are using.

It is recommended that you keep your PDS up to date with new versions, otherwise things may break. You can use the pdsadmin tool to update your PDS.

sudo pdsadmin update

This project is dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0 terms:

• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT.txt or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE.txt or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

Downstream projects and end users may choose either license individually, or both together, at their discretion. The motivation for this dual-licensing is the additional software patent assurance provided by Apache 2.0.