Deployment

How nostrfy is distributed, and a comparison of all supported deployment platforms.

One binary, several platforms

nostrfy ships pre-built binaries for x86_64 and aarch64 (GitHub release assets, checksum-verified by install.sh), a container image that downloads those binaries (no compilation needed), and deployment guides for the major platforms.

Platforms

Platform	Type	Guide
Fly.io	Managed platform (containers, volumes, TLS)	fly.md
Digital Ocean	Droplet (VM) or App Platform	deploy/digitalocean.md
AWS	EC2 (VM), Lightsail or ECS	deploy/aws.md
Google Cloud	Compute Engine (VM) or Cloud Run	deploy/gcp.md
Azure	VM or Container Apps	deploy/azure.md
Any VPS	plain Ubuntu/Debian server	deploy/vps.md

The common pattern for VMs

All the VM guides (Digital Ocean, AWS EC2, GCP, Azure, any VPS) follow the same pattern:

# 1. Install the latest release binary (no sudo needed for the install itself)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iqbqioza/nostrfy/main/install.sh | sh

# 2. Fetch the config template and edit it (no repository clone needed)
sudo mkdir -p /etc/nostrfy
sudo curl -fsSL -o /etc/nostrfy/nostrfy.toml \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iqbqioza/nostrfy/main/deploy/nostrfy.toml
sudo nano /etc/nostrfy/nostrfy.toml                   # set name, public_url, private_key

# 3. Fetch the systemd unit and start the service
sudo curl -fsSL -o /etc/systemd/system/nostrfy.service \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iqbqioza/nostrfy/main/deploy/nostrfy.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now nostrfy

# 4. Open the port (usually 8080) in the provider's firewall and verify
curl http://localhost:8080/health

Before going live

Every deployment uses the same nostrfy.toml options. Before going live, set at least:

toml

[relay]
name = "My Relay"
public_url = "wss://relay.example.com"   # required for NIP-42 AUTH / NIP-62 / NIP-98
private_key = ""                          # run 'nostrfy genkey' and paste the key

VM or container?

VM (systemd): simplest, cheapest, full control. Recommended for most relay deployments.
Container: use the repository Dockerfile (downloads the release binary at build time) on Fly.io, Digital Ocean App Platform, AWS ECS, GCP Cloud Run or Azure Container Apps. Persistent storage is required for the LMDB data (/data).

Blossom media host

If blossom.host is set, point that hostname at the same port in the TLS proxy too (see the VPS guide for nginx/Caddy blocks).

TLS is terminated by your proxy or the provider

The relay itself serves plain WebSocket on 8080 and honors X-Forwarded-Proto.