Self-Hosting

Distributed Press uses Ansible (opens in a new tab) to make setting up your own Distributed Press instance fast and simple.

These scripts can help you deploy Distributed Press on your own VPS via SSH.

The default playbook will deploy your distributed.press instance and set up all the appropriate Firewall configurations to allow Distributed Press to work properly.

Please ensure you have both Python 3 and Ansible installed before proceeding with the setup steps.

Steps

1. Edit inventory.yml to specify your own domain to run the scripts on as well as any variables you wish to set.

   Specifically, you must specify the distributed_press_domain do be your server, and your distributed_press_letsencrypt_email for registering the HTTPS certificate. You may specify a list of domains in distributed_press_served_sites which specifies which domains you'd like to serve over HTTPS in addition to the peer-to-peer protocols.

all:
  # Set custom variables here, like custom ports for listening
  vars:
    distributed_press_domain: "example.com"
    distributed_press_letsencrypt_email: "example@example.com"
    distributed_press_served_sites: []
  children:
    distributed_press:
      hosts:
        example.com:
          ansible_user: root

2. Install the dependencies

   $ ansible-galaxy install -r ./requirements.yml

3. Execute the playbook

   # execute the Ansible playbook with user defined variables
   $ ansible-playbook distributed_press.yml -i inventory.yml

4. After you deploy your server you will need to add _dnslink records to your DP instance via NS records. e.g. NS _dnslink.example.com example.com

Debugging

1. Check the status of the service: systemctl status distributed.press
2. Follow the logs of the service: journalctl -fu distributed.press