Note: this guide is based on Alpine Linux setups, but you may use them for other distributions as well.

Requirements

• A VPS or VM publicly accessible
• A domain name
• DNS hosted on Cloudflare (or your preferred registrar)
• The Go toolchain
• A cup of your favourite beverage (mine is tea :D)

DNS Setup

• Update and configure your VPS/VM how you prefer. Hardening and configuration are out of the scope for this guide.
• Ensure ports 80 and 443 (TCP) are open via IPTables, NFTables, or UFW, however you choose to open them.
• Visit Cloudflare panel and point salty.example.com to the publicly-routed IP address of your system, ensure proxy is checked.
• Grab your API key from the Cloudflare interface, you’ll need this shortly.
• Add an SRV record for Salty service discovery
  • Type: SRV
  • Name: example.com
  • Service: _salty
  • Protocol: TCP
  • TTL: 3600 (One hour)
  • Priority: 0 (highest)
  • Weight: 0
  • Port: 443
  • Target: salty.example.com
• And another for Salty avatar discovery
  • Type: SRV
  • Name: example.com
  • Service: _avatars
  • Protocol: TCP
  • TTL: 3600 (One hour)
  • Priority: 0 (highest)
  • Weight: 0
  • Port: 443
  • Target: salty.example.com
• Grab a coffee (or your favourite beverage) and wait a few minutes as DNS can take a bit.

Infrastructure Setup

• Run: apk add go nginx to install the web server/reverse proxy and the toolchain
• Use the following snippet and then add it to nginx’s configuration file:

 1server {
 2 listen 80;
 3 listen [::]:80;
 4 server_name salty.example.com;
 5 
 6 return 301 https://$host$request_url;
 7}
 8
 9server {
10 listen 443 ssl;
11 listen [::]:443 ssl;
12 server_name salty.example.com;
13 
14 ssl_certificate /path/to/salty.example.com/fullchain.pem; # If you use certbot or dehydrated, use the right paths
15 ssl_certificate_key /path/to/salty.example.com/privkey.pem; # Same as above
16 
17 location / {
18  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
19 }
20}

• Run: go install go.salty.im/saltyim/cmd/saltyd@latest to install the broker/webapp, ideally as its own user (i.e. _salty)
• Use the following snippet for OpenRC:

 1#!/sbin/openrc-run
 2
 3depend() {
 4 need net
 5 use dns
 6}
 7
 8command="/path/to/saltyd"
 9command_args="--base-url salty.yourdomain.com --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 --primary-domain yourdomain.com --store bitcask://path/to/saltyd_directory/saltyim.db --data /path/to/saltyd_directory/data"
10command_background=true
11command_user="_salty:_salty"
12procname="saltyd"

• Run: rc-update add saltyd default and rc-service saltyd start to get saltyd running
• If there are no issues, you should be able to visit https://salty.yourdomain.com and view the PWA