Fly.io

What ships in the repo

Prerequisites

• A Fly.io account
• The flyctl CLI (fly version)
• Logged in: fly auth login

Deploy in four steps

1. Launch the app (without deploying yet)

cd /path/to/nostrfy
fly launch --no-deploy --name <your-app-name> --region <region>

• <your-app-name> must be unique on Fly (it becomes part of the relay URL: wss://<your-app-name>.fly.dev)
• <region>: e.g. nrt (Tokyo), fra, iad, sjc — pick the region closest to your users
• This may overwrite the template's fly.toml values (app name, region) — that is fine

2. Create the persistent volume

The LMDB database lives on a Fly volume mounted at /data:

fly volumes create data --size 1 --region <region>

1 GB is enough to start (the database grows with usage). You can resize later, or create a larger volume from the start.

3. Configure the relay

Edit deploy/nostrfy.container.toml before deploying:

[relay]
name = "My Relay"                              # shown in clients via NIP-11
description = "A friendly relay for everyone"
private_key = "..."                            # required for NIP-29 groups
public_url = "wss://<your-app-name>.fly.dev"   # required for NIP-42/62/98

• private_key: generate locally with nostrfy genkey (against a temporary config) and paste the key, or generate one with any Nostr tool
• public_url must match your app name — without it, NIP-42 AUTH, NIP-62 vanish and the NIP-86 management API will not work
• Everything else can stay at the defaults

4. Deploy

fly deploy

Fly builds the image (a few minutes — the binary download is fast, the image is small), creates a machine and runs the health check against /health.

Verify

# log line: "relay listening on ws://0.0.0.0:8080"
fly logs

# NIP-11 information document over the public address
curl https://<your-app-name>.fly.dev/

# point your Nostr client at wss://<your-app-name>.fly.dev

Scaling and updates

• Update the relay: edit deploy/nostrfy.container.toml and fly deploy again — the image always downloads the latest GitHub release binary, so an update is a simple redeploy
• Pin a version: docker build --build-arg NOSTRFY_VERSION=v0.1.10 ... or change the ARG in the Dockerfile
• Scale: the relay is a single machine by default. fly machines clone <id> creates a second machine; both share the volume (Fly volumes support multiple machines in the same region)
• Metrics: Fly collects the /metrics endpoint (see [metrics] in fly.toml) and shows it in the Fly dashboard under Metrics

Customizing the configuration

The image reads /etc/nostrfy/nostrfy.toml, baked from deploy/nostrfy.container.toml. Two ways to customize:

1. Edit deploy/nostrfy.container.toml in the repository and redeploy (simplest)
2. Mount your own config: build a fork of the image that copies your config file over /etc/nostrfy/nostrfy.toml

Every option is documented in the configuration reference.

Notes

• Always-on by design: auto_stop_machines = false in fly.toml — a relay must never be stopped during idle periods
• The container runs the relay in foreground mode (nostrfy start --foreground); logs go to stdout/stderr and are collected by Fly
• TLS is terminated by Fly; the relay itself serves plain WebSocket on port 8080
• Blossom media host: to serve the Blossom server too, set blossom.host = "media.example.com" in the config, add media.example.com as an additional hostname of the same Fly app (fly.toml [[services]] http_options.allowed_http_hostnames or fly hostnames), and add the media. TLS certificate in the Fly dashboard — the relay splits the hosts internally (like server.api_host)