3.6 KiB
Checklist
Before you dive in and start installing, you should do a little planning ahead. Ask yourself what you expect from your server.
Is it a small server, just for yourself and some friends and family, or for your hundreds of colleagues at work? Is it for private use, or do you need decent moderation tools? Do you need audio and videoconferencing or not?
Requirements
It's difficult to specify hardware requirements upfront, because they don't really depend on the number of users you have, but on their behaviour. A server with users who don't engage in busy rooms like #matrix:matrix.org doesn't need more than 2 CPU cores, 8GB of RAM and 50GB of diskspace.
A server with users who do join very busy rooms, can easily eat 4 cores and 16GB of RAM. Or more. Or even much more.
During its life, the server may need more resources, if users change their behaviour. Or less. There's no one-size-fits-all approach.
If you have no idea, you should probably start with 2 cores, 8GB RAM and some 50GB diskspace, and follow the monolithic setup.
If you expect a higher load (you might get there sooner than you think), you should probably follow the worker-based setup, because changing the architecture from monolithic to worker-based once the server is already in use, is a tricky task.
DNS and certificates
You'll need to configure several things in DNS, and you're going to need a couple of TLS-certificates. Best to configure those DNS entries first, so that you can quickly generate the certificates once you're there.
It's usually a good idea to keep the TTL of all these records very low while installing and configuring, so that you can quickly change records without having to wait for the TTL to expire. Setting a TTL of 300 (5 minutes) should be fine. Once everything is in place and working, you should probably increase it to a more production ready value, like 3600 (1 hour) or more.
What do you need? Well, first of all you need a domain. In this documentation
we'll use example.com, you'll need to substitute that with your own domain.
Under the top of that domain, you'll need to host 2 files under
/.well-known, so you'll need a webserver there, using a valid
TLS-certificate. This doesn't have to be the same machine as the one you're
installing Synapse on. In fact, it usually isn't.
Assuming you're hosting Matrix on the machine matrix.example.com, you need
at least an A record in DNS, and -if you have IPv6 support, which you
should- an AAAA record too. YOU CAN NOT USE A CNAME FOR THIS RECORD!
You'll need a valid TLS-certificate for matrix.example.com too.
You'll probably want the webclient too, so that users aren't forced to use an
app on their phone or install the desktop client on their PC. You should never
run the web client on the same name as the server, that opens you up for all
kinds of Cross-Site-Scripting attack. We'll assume you use
element.example.com for the web client. You need a DNS entry for that. This
can be a CNAME, but make sure you have a TLS-certificate with the correct name
on it.
If you install a TURN-server, either for legacy calls or for Element
Call (or both), you need a DNS entry for that too, and -again- a
TLS-certificate. We'll use turn.example.com for this.
If you install Element Call (and why shouldn't you?), you need a DNS entry plus
certificate for that, let's assume you use call.example.com for that. This
can be a CNAME again. Element Call uses LiveKit for the
actual processing of audio and video, and that needs its own DNS entry and certificate
too. We'll use livekit.example.com.