Bluesky PDS Easy Deployment

This repository provides a step-by-step guide for deploying the Bluesky Personal Data Server (PDS) on a Linux system.
It is similar to bluesky-social/pds, but it only uses Docker to run services, making the deployment process simpler and more straightforward compared to the installer.sh script in the original repository.

Prerequisites

• A server (minimum 1 CPU core, 1 GB RAM) with a public IP address and firewall rules allowing traffic on ports 80 and 443
• OS (Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 or Debian 11/12 preferred)
• Docker
• Docker Compose
• A domain name

Installation

1. Set up DNS records

Create DNS records to point your domain name to your server's IP address.

Type	Name	IP	TTL
A	bsky.example.com	1.2.3.4	600
A	*.bsky.example.com	1.2.3.4	600

2. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/aykhans/bsky-pds-easy.git && cd bsky-pds-easy

3. Generate the pds.env file

cp pds.env.example pds.env

4. Configure the pds.env file

Generate PDS_JWT_SECRET with OpenSSL:

sed -i "s/PDS_JWT_SECRET=/PDS_JWT_SECRET=$(openssl rand --hex 16)/" pds.env

Generate PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD with OpenSSL:

sed -i "s/PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=/PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand --hex 16)/" pds.env

Generate PDS_PLC_ROTATION_KEY_K256_PRIVATE_KEY_HEX with OpenSSL:

sed -i "s/PDS_PLC_ROTATION_KEY_K256_PRIVATE_KEY_HEX=/PDS_PLC_ROTATION_KEY_K256_PRIVATE_KEY_HEX=$(openssl ecparam --name secp256k1 --genkey --noout --outform DER | tail --bytes=+8 | head --bytes=32 | xxd --plain --cols 32)/" pds.env

Then, manually fill in the following fields in your pds.env file:

PDS_HOSTNAME=bsky.example.com
PDS_EMAIL_SMTP_URL=smtps://username:[email protected]/
[email protected]

5. Start the services with Docker Compose

docker compose up -d

Next Steps

After successfully starting the services, you can create an account using bsky-pdsadmin-dockerized.

Example:

docker run -it --rm --env-file ./pds.env aykhans/bsky-pdsadmin account create

You can now visit https://bsky.app and log in using your custom PDS server (bsky.example.com) and your newly created credentials.