ln-nostr-rs-relay

This is a nostr relay, written in Rust. It currently supports the entire relay protocol, and persists data with SQLite.

This is a fork of https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay.

The intention is that in the future, this fork will implement Lightning integration for relays to earn micr-payments for posts and facilitate tips between users.

Features

NIPs with a relay-specific implementation are listed here.

Hardware / Virtual Machine

Using a virtual machine allows you to scale your relay as the amount of data and users increases with time. For a private-ish, friends/family relay, you can start with an x64 based architecture, 2 GB RAM, 30 GB SSD. Make sure you choose Ubuntu Server 20.04 or 22.04. Generate a SSH keypair file, make a note of the name, and save it locally. Ensure that the server is available via SSH (22), HTTP (80), and HTTPS (443).

DNS

Login to your DNS provider and set an A record for nostr.example.com to point to the public IP address of the VM you just created. You can confirm the DNS propogation is successful by running:

$ ping nostr.example.com
123.456.789.100

Installation and configuration

1. Connect to the server via SSH

To connect the the machine, run the following SSH command (on Windows, by opening a command window as an Administrator, and changing directory to where you saved the SSH keypair file) and run:

$ ssh -i <SSH-keypair-filename>.pem <SSH-keypair-name>@<IP-address>

2. Update system packages

To update your Ubuntu system packages, run the following:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade -y

3. Install required dependencies

To install the required dependencies, such as the nginx web server, certbot to generate SSL certificates, python3-certbot-nginx to serve HTTPS content, apt-transport-https to allow for the use of repositories accessed via the HTTP Secure protoco, ca-certificates to be a Certificate Authority on the Ubuntu server, curl to be able to transmit data using various protocols using the command line, and software-properties-common to allow us to easily manage distribution and independent software vendor software sources.

$ sudo apt install -y nginx certbot python3-certbot-nginx
$ sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

To check the installation of some of the dependencies, run:

$ nginx -V
nginx version: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
built with OpenSSL 1.1.1f  31 Mar 2020
TLS SNI support enabled
$ certbot --version
certbot 1.32.2

4. Setup Docker

As Ubuntu desn't ship with Docker's package repository, we need to add it. Packages repositories and signed with with GPG, we first need to make a directory to store pub keys, then import Dockers.

$ sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
$ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg

We then need to put the PGP key we downloaded, and put it in the right place by running:

$ echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

To setup Docker, run the following:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt-get install -y docker-ce

To check Docker is installed correctly run:

$ docker --version
Docker version 20.10.22, build 3a2c30b

5. Make user to own directory

$ sudo groupadd --gid 1000 appuser
$ sudo useradd --uid 1000 --gid appuser appuser

6. Make directory for relay database to live

$ sudo mkdir /nostr-data
$ sudo mkdir /nostr-data/data
$ sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /nostr-data

7. Configure the relay

To make changes to the relay, we need to edit the config.toml file. This file gives options include rate-limiting, event size limits, and network address settings. To make the changes required, run:

$ sudo nano /nostr-data/config.toml

Within this file, you will want to make changes to the following lines (replacing with your relay details and your public key in HEX format):

name = "nostr-example"
description = "A newly created nostr-rs-relay from nostr.example.com."
pubkey = "971615b70ad9ec896f8d5ba0f2d01652f1dfe5f9ced81ac9469ca7facefad68b"
mode = "passive"
port = 7000
relay_url = "wss://nostr.example.com/"

If, for example if you want to restrict publishing on your relay to NIP-05 verified users of a particular domain locate the [verified_users] section towards the bottom of the file and make the following changes:

Change mode = "passive" to mode = "enabled"
Change #domain_whitelist = ["example.com"] to domain_whitelist = ["nostr.example.com"] (note the removal of the # at the beginning of the line)

Save your changes by pressing Ctrl+X, enter Y, then Return.

8. Start the relay

To start the relay, run the following command:

$ sudo docker run -it -d \
 -p 127.0.0.1:7000:7000 \
 --mount src=/nostr-data/config.toml,target=/usr/src/app/config.toml,type=bind \
 --mount src=/nostr-data/data,target=/usr/src/app/db,type=bind \
 --restart unless-stopped \
 --pull always \
 scsibug/nostr-rs-relay:latest

To check for success, run the following command:

curl localhost:7000

You should see Please use a Nostr client to connect.

9. Configure reverse proxy

To make changes to default Nginx configuration, run:

$ sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

And insert the following (replacing nostr.example.com with your domain):

server{
    server_name nostr.example.com;
    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:7000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    }
}

Save your changes by pressing Ctrl+X, enter Y, then Return.

Now restart Nginx by running:

$ sudo systemctl restart nginx

10. Setup SSL

We can request an SSL certificate from letsencrypt/certbot by running the following (replace nostr.example.com with yours):

$ sudo certbot --nginx -d nostr.example.com

11. Test the WebSocket and HTTPS connections

To test the WebSocket connection, navigate to https://websocketking.com,and enter wss://nostr.example.com (replacing with your sub-domain details), and click Connect. You should see you are successfully connected.

To test the HTTPS connection, navigate to https://nostr.example.com (replacing with your sub-domain details). It should say Please use a Nostr client to connect.

12. Add your relay to your client

Finally, in your Nostr client, add your newly created relay wss://nostr.example.com (replacing with your sub-domain details). Submit some posts :-)

13. Query your relay

To determine the size of your database, you can do:

$ wc -c /nostr-data/data/nostr.db
392765440 /nostr-data/data/nostr.db

To query the database itself, we need to install SQLite3, by running:

$ sudo apt install sqlite3

You can then query your relay, by running commands such as:

$ sqlite3 /nostr-data/data/nostr.db
$ .tables
event              tag                user_verification
$ pragma table_info(event);
0|id|INTEGER|0||1
1|event_hash|BLOB|1||0
2|first_seen|INTEGER|1||0
3|created_at|INTEGER|1||0
4|author|BLOB|1||0
5|delegated_by|BLOB|0||0
6|kind|INTEGER|1||0
7|hidden|INTEGER|0||0
8|content|TEXT|1||0
$ pragma table_info(tag);
0|id|INTEGER|0||1
1|event_id|INTEGER|1||0
2|name|TEXT|0||0
3|value|TEXT|0||0
4|value_hex|BLOB|0||0
$ pragma table_info(user_verification);
0|id|INTEGER|0||1
1|metadata_event|INTEGER|1||0
2|name|TEXT|1||0
3|verified_at|INTEGER|0||0
4|failed_at|INTEGER|0||0
5|failure_count|INTEGER|0|0|0
$ select count(*) from event;
5
$ select count(distinct author) from event;
1
$ select count(*) from event where kind = 1;

Press CTRL + Z and ENTER to exit SQLite3.

Publicly announce your relay [optional]

To publicly announce your relay, you can add your relay to the list in Relays.Yaml and then submit a pull-request:

https://github.com/dskvr/nostr-watch

Once merged, your relay should appear here:

https://nostr.watch

Next Steps

You may want to consider hardening your VM against common attack types by performing actions such as:

Hardning the SSH server
Installing a firewall

Further configuration changes

Note: If you want to make further changes to those you made in Step 7, you'll need to locate the ID of your docker container to restart it and then restart it (replacing the ID with your container ID):

$ sudo docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                           COMMAND                  CREATED      STATUS      PORTS                                                 NAMES
45c85585b818   scsibug/nostr-rs-relay:latest   "/bin/sh -c './nostr…"   3 days ago   Up 3 days   0.0.0.0:7000->7000/tcp, :::7000->7000/tcp, 8080/tcp   agitated_darwin
$ sudo docker restart 45c85585b818

BenGWeeks/ln-nostr-rs-relay