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There a lots of instructions on setting up Synapse homeserver. I had two requirements I wanted to follow in making mine. First I wanted everything in Docker, and second I didn't want to open any external ports.
To do this I used a Cloudflare Argo Tunnel to talk to the service in docker. While Matrix can use a different port and/or domain for clients and federation I used the same one.
Cloudflare appears to charge for their Argo Tunnel setup on regular accounts, but for some reason doesn't have the same requirement on Team accounts. It might be possible to skip this step, but if you run in to Argo permissions errors give it a try. Browse to their team url and create a free team:
Tunnels can be created when the service starts, but the issue with that is that the domain will appear and disappear from DNS depending on if the service is running. Instead I created a tunnel manually, mostly following the directions in the Argo documentation:
Install `cloudflared`, and run `cloudflared tunnel login`. I did this from my local machine as there's no reason to log in to cloudflare from the hosting instance. The login will create a `cert.pem` file. In Linux will will be stored in `~/.cloudflared/cert.pem`.
I'm using the same tunnel for multiple services, so I've named it based on the host to which it will tunnel: `cloudflared tunnel create instance-1`. This will create a UUID file something like `~/.cloudflared/76d3f4c5-9be6-485f-9a16-2e705d11255c.json`. Copy this file to the hosting instance (which I'll continue to call `instance-1`).
Create a basic `config.yaml` for the tunnel. For now we will configure it with a simple built-in "Hello World" server. It should look something like:
tunnel: 76d3f4c5-9be6-485f-9a16-2e705d11255c credentials-file: /etc/cloudflared/76d3f4c5-9be6-485f-9a16-2e705d11255c.json hello-world: true
Next we'll create the DNS records to point to the tunnel. This can be done with a command like `cloudflared tunnel route dns instance-1 matrix.example.com` (if run without the `cert.pem` file you must use the UUID instead of the name).
Finally we'll dockerize the above. The config files could be put in a volume if desired, but for now I'm storing them next to the `docker-compose.yaml`.
version: "3"
services:
argo-tunnel:
image: cloudflare/cloudflared:2020.12.0
container_name: tunnel
command: ["tunnel", "--no-autoupdate", "run"]
volumes:
- "./config.yml:/etc/cloudflared/config.yml:ro"
- "./76d3f4c5-9be6-485f-9a16-2e705d11255c.json:/etc/cloudflared/76d3f4c5-9be6-485f-9a16-2e705d11255c.json:ro"
networks:
- tunnel
restart: unless-stopped
networks:
tunnel:
external:
name: tunnel
The network is set up as external, so it needs to be created manually with
`docker network create tunnel`. This network will be the one used to communicate between services and the tunnel.
`docker-compose up -d` the above and then browse to your `matrix.example.com` domain to confirm the tunnel is up and running.
I'll assume you already have a postgres docker server running. Create a database for synapse. I used the following:
CREATE USER synapse_user WITH PASSWORD 'CHANGEME'; CREATE DATABASE synapse ENCODING 'UTF8' LC_COLLATE='C' LC_CTYPE='C' template=template0 OWNER synapse_user;
First we need to create a config file. The synapse docker docs recommended the following command:
docker run -it --rm \
--mount type=volume,src=synapse-data,dst=/data \
-e SYNAPSE_SERVER_NAME=matrix.example.com \
-e SYNAPSE_REPORT_STATS=yes \
matrixdotorg/synapse:latest generate
This will generate a config file in a docker volume. It can be edited in a number of ways, I'm simply mounting the volume in an alpine container. I changed:
public_baseurl: https://matrix.example.com
database:
name: psycopg2
args:
user: synapse_user
password: CHANGEME
database: synapse
host: postgres
cp_min: 5
cp_max: 10
Then we'll set up the docker-compose and `docker-compose up -d`.
version: "3"
services:
synapse:
image: matrixdotorg/synapse:latest
container_name: synapse
environment:
- SYNAPSE_CONFIG_PATH=/data/homeserver.yaml
volumes:
- data:/data
networks:
- tunnel
- db
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
data:
external:
name: synapse-data
networks:
tunnel:
external:
name: tunnel
db:
external:
name: postgres
Back in the Argo Tunnel `config.yml` we can point it to this service. The config was updated. The path value was added to prevent external client from being able to access any of the admin APIs.
tunnel: 76d3f4c5-9be6-485f-9a16-2e705d11255c
credentials-file: /etc/cloudflared/76d3f4c5-9be6-485f-9a16-2e705d11255c.json
ingress:
- hostname: matrix.example.com
path: (/_matrix/|/_synapse/client/).*
service: http://synapse:8008
- service: http_status:404
`docker-compose restart` to update the tunnel config.
This is only needed if the server is using a domain other than the base domain. E.g. if `@user:example.com` exists on `matrix.example.com`. This _should_ also be able to be accomplished with SRV DNS records, but Cloudflare currently has a bug where setting the target of a SRV record to a proxied domain is just broken.
Pretty much anything could be used to return the files to point to the matrix server location. As I'd already used them I created a Cloudflare Worker and routed `example.com/.well-known/matrix/*` to it. The `.well-known/matrix/server` URL simply returns: `{"m.server":"matrix.example.com:443"}`.
The well-known client file is not required, but could make it so clients didn't have to remember `matrix.example.com`. Mine looks like: `{"m.homeserver":{"base_url":"https://matrix.example.com"}}`.
Next we're going to test if everything is working correctly. Enter the base domain (`example.com`) in to the federation tester at:
https://federationtester.matrix.org/
To create a user we're going to connect to the synapse docker image with `docker exec -it synapse bash` and run `register_new_matrix_user -c /data/homeserver.yaml http://localhost:8008/`. Make sure you make them an admin.
Now start your favourite client and enter `@user:example.com` or `matrix.example.com` depending on how the client logs in. Don't forget to do a Secure Backup so you don't lose access to your messages