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Host your own matrix server in the cloud(AWS)

This doc assumes basic knowledge of how to use git and familiarity with the command-line

We are going to spin up our own matrix server in the cloud. In this doc, we are aiming for the following

  • spin up own server in the cloud and be able to ssh to it
  • setup this matrix-ansible-playbook and edit configuration to properly install and setup matrix in our cloud server without too much overhead
  • connect to our matrix server using Element UI

Because this doc will assume your are running the setup locally from your laptop/deskop, we need to get first things right before going on.

  • First, we need to ensure we have Ansible installed locally. For MacOs flavors, brew install ansible will do the trick if you can't install natively
    • Run ansible --version to verify it was properly installed.
  • We are going to get familiar with ansible-playbook command to get everything up and running ✌️ .

Once you've got an okay from the above, we can proceed to spinning up our server in AWS. First, shopping for a cloud server.

Prerequisite

x86 server(this doc supports this architecture) - you can spin one yourself in AWS

  • Ubuntu >= 22.04: you can select this OS and version when setting up your server
  • Make sure some of the following TCP ports are open(this way you can allow this playbook to run connection on your server) - you can set these up in instance security credentials:
    • 80/tcp for HTTP webserver
    • 443/tcp for HTTPS webserver
    • 8448/tcp for matrix federation api. We need this in-order for our server to be discoverable in matrix network. There are more ports needed to enable feature like voice/video chat but for now this will do.

Domain

  • Your matrix server url will be like https:matrix.<your_domain>.com, so it looks like we need to do domain shopping before proceeding. If you looks at the url, matrix is a subdomain. So this guide will definitely get setup you up with necessary dns configurations. element subdomain will be where element UI will be installed and be able to access your matrix server from the browser. At the end of this doc you'll have access to your matrix server at https://element.<your_domain>.

  • I went extra and this how my dns configs look like:

    Type Host Target
    A Record @ <server_ip_address>
    A Record www <server_ip_address>
    A Record matrix <server_ip_address>
    CNAME Record element matrix.<your_domain>

  • To setup extra features, such as voice/video chat, this guide is quite exhaustive with necessary dns configs to unlock extra of those ✌️ .

We are more interested in getting our server up, connect to it, and be able to invite user(s) & send messages to our server.

Getting the script for setup

We are going to use matrix-ansible-playbook to provision resources to our server. You can choose to clone this repo into your home or directory of your choice.

Fire up your terminal and run this command inside the directory of your choice. Once that is done, navigate into matrix-docker-ansible-playbook and we are going to run any setup, installatio, services upgrading in this directory.

Configuring the script

Once you have the okay of the above, we are about to edit some playbook default configs to our liking.

  • Create a domain directory mkdir inventory/host_vars/matrix.<your_domain>
  • Copy the sample configuration cp examples/vars.yml inventory/host_vars/matrix.<your-domain>/vars.yml
  • Edit inventory/host_vars/matrix.<your-domain>/vars.yml
  • Copy inventory cp examples/hosts inventory/hosts
  • Edit inventory/hosts to your liking

I think that all you need. If anything this guide is exhaustive ✌️ .

Installing

Make sure you have:

  • setup and configured your domain ✅
  • downloaded the playbook ✅
  • configured the playbook as needed ✅ before we proceed.

Run the following command to start provisioning matrix services to your server.

Once the above has completed successfully, run this command to start matrix services

Setup federation

This is so that your server is discoverable in the matrix network. This guide requires that you add a config line to your playbook configuration.

Remember, the playbook configuration is inventory/host_vars/matrix.<your-domain>/vars.yml. Any edit to this file will require service restart: ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all,start

Verify that its all good, navigate to https://<your_domain>. You will be served with a Hello from <your_domain>! page in the browser.

Final

If everything ran successfully, you should be able to access your matrix server from https://element.<your_domain>. You will be presented with a login page which needs a username and password. The easier way to get around this is to run the below command to create the first genesis user in your matrix server:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml -e username=<your_choice> -e password=<your_choice> -e admin=yes --tags=register-user