How do you deal with the complexity of hosting Matrix?
I was in the same position, wanted to set one up - decided it was too much work.
I was in the same position, wanted to set one up - decided it was too much work.
https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/
Been hosting it alongside some bridges(like irc) for a while now.
Shameless plug - for people who'd rather not maintain their own server manually with Ansible, a few others and I are running https://etke.cc - a completely FOSS service service built on top of the Ansible playbook. Hopefully, this provides the best of both worlds - ease of getting started (on your own or on a rented server), everything built on top of FOSS, no vendor-lock-in (you can migrate to using the playbook yourself at any time, etc.).
But you want sysadmin pain points, here are some random pointers in no particular order:
- Familiarity with reverse proxies helps a lot. I recommend terminating both client (443) and federation (8448) traffic through nginx or similar.
- The Synapse Github (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues) is one of the first places I start trawling if something gets weird.
- Federation is the second-hardest part, and if something goes wrong and you're not watching the Synapse logs it can fail silently - here it helps to have friends on other instances there to check connectivity (and blame you when THEIR instance breaks federation, that's fun). https://federationtester.matrix.org and similar help a lot too, and it's good to at least have a couple of bots from matrix.org to poke at if you suspect something's amiss.
- Fuck everything about troubleshooting STUN/TURN. Newer playbooks may make coturn deployment easier.
- It's easy to test migrations/deployments with an update to your hosts file - you can verify that your clients connect to the new server and that data has been restored without doing anything to the original server.
EDIT - Keep in mind that a lot of the above went on from 2018-2019 (except the server migration, but that was easy) and the documentation/automation has improved quite a lot since then.