nostrfy

Digital Ocean

Deploy nostrfy on a Digital Ocean Droplet or App Platform.

Two options: a Droplet (VM, simplest) or the App Platform (containers).

Option 1: Droplet (recommended)

  1. Create a Droplet: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, any size (1 GB RAM is enough to start). A droplet in a region close to your users lowers latency.
  2. SSH in and follow the generic VPS guide:
sh
ssh root@<droplet-ip>
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iqbqioza/nostrfy/main/install.sh | sh
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
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
  1. Open the port in the Droplet firewall (the Digital Ocean Cloud Firewall is recommended): allow inbound TCP 8080 (and 443 if you add TLS).
  2. Verify:
sh
curl http://<droplet-ip>:8080/health
  1. Add TLS (wss://) with certbot + nginx, or Digital Ocean's managed load balancer with a certificate — then set relay.public_url = "wss://relay.example.com" and restart.

Option 2: App Platform (container)

The App Platform builds from the repository Dockerfile (which downloads the pre-built release binary):

  1. Connect your GitHub repo and create an app from it.
  2. Port: set the HTTP port to 8080 (the relay listens there).
  3. Persistent disk: mount a volume at /data (LMDB data lives there — without it, data is lost on every deploy).
  4. Env: the deploy/nostrfy.container.toml baked into the image can be replaced by mounting your own config at /etc/nostrfy/nostrfy.toml (create a fork that copies it, or use a Dockerfile COPY in your own repo).
  5. TLS: App Platform provides https:// automatically for the app domain — set relay.public_url accordingly.

Both options

  • Updates: re-run install.sh + systemctl restart nostrfy (Droplet), or push to the connected repo (App Platform).
  • All configuration is documented in the configuration reference.