Generally these are servers in data centres, but you might be able to make a port available to the Internet on a home machine if your ISP doesn't use CGNAT and you know how to configure your firewall/router for this. We leave this up to you.

Deploying the files

As root, you'll want to create a chorus user. Here is an example for debian based systems:

# useradd -r -d /opt/chorus -s /bin/bash chorus

As root, you'll want to make the following directories

# mkdir -p /opt/chorus/{etc,src,var,sbin,lib}
# mkdir -p /opt/chorus/var/{chorus,www}
# mkdir -p /opt/chorus/lib/systemd/system
# chown -R chorus /opt/chorus

Now you can clone the chorus source code onto the server.

If you will be building as a different user (e.g. your personal login), you might want to change the ownership of this directory to yourself. This is particularly useful if you already have rust installed via rustup and don't want to install another rust system under the chorus user.

We continue presuming you will be installing rust under the chorus user.

# sudo -iu chorus
$ cd /opt/chorus/src
$ git clone https://github.com/mikedilger/chorus
$ cd chorus

Now we install rust as the chorus user. Beware this uses a fair amount of space for rust package downloads that is not shared with any other user on the system.

If you have rustc and cargo installed at the system level you can use those instead and can skip this step. This step comes from (https://rustup.rs)[https://rustup.rs]

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

If you are coming back here after some time, you may wish to update rust instead:

$ rustup update

Now let's continue by building chorus:

$ cd /opt/chorus/src/chorus
$ cargo build --release

Ok now let's install that:

$ install --mode=0700 ./target/release/chorus /opt/chorus/sbin/chorus

Now let's create our config file

$ cp /opt/chorus/src/chorus/contrib/chorus.ron /opt/chorus/etc/

Go ahead and edit that file to your liking. In particular:

Change the ip_address to your internet-accessible IP address (if you are running directly) or to 127.0.0.1 with a local port like 8080 (if you are proxying behind nginx)
Change the port if necessary
Change the name, description, and contact (e.g. your email address) as desired
Set your public_key_hex (it is an option, so use Some())
Set hex keys of users for which this relay will act as a personal relay

Setting up the Service

We describe two options for setting up the service. The first is to run chorus directly. The second is to run chorus behind an nginx proxy.

If you want chorus to respond on port 443, and you host other virtual servers on the machine, you'll need to run chorus behind an nginx proxy.

But you can run in on a different port (e.g. 444) too. Remember to open up your firewall for this if necessary.

Running chorus directly

Copy the systemd service file from the source code to the install location:

$ cp /opt/chorus/src/chorus/contrib/chorus-direct.service /opt/chorus/lib/systemd/system/chorus.service

Edit this file to change the letsencrypt paths to include your actual domain (replace the chorus.example.com part).

NOTE ON TLS CERTIFICATES: We will presume that you manage TLS certificates for your server with letsencrypt and certbot, and that certificates can be found (as root) under the /etc/letsencrypt/ directory. Our systemd service file will copy those certificates into /opt/chorus/etc/tls each time it starts so it has access to them (it doesn't run as root so it needs copies that are owned by chorus that it can access).

Make the directory for certificate copies:

$ mkdir -p --mode=0700 /opt/chorus/etc/tls

As root, enable the service and start the service:

# systemctl enable /opt/chorus/lib/systemd/system/chorus.service
# systemctl start chorus.service

Running behind nginx

Copy the systemd service file from the source code to the install location:

$ cp /opt/chorus/src/chorus/contrib/chorus-proxied.service /opt/chorus/lib/systemd/system/chorus.service

Copy the nginx config file to the install location:

$ cp /opt/chorus/src/chorus/contrib/chorus.nginx.conf /opt/chorus/etc/chorus.nginx.conf

Change the port on the proxy_pass line if you are running chorus on a different port.

As root, enable the service and start the service:

# systemctl enable /opt/chorus/lib/systemd/system/chorus.service
# systemctl start chorus.service

Link the nginx config file

# ln -s /opt/chorus/etc/chorus.nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/chorus.nginx.conf
# ln -s ../sites-available/chorus.nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/chorus.nginx.conf

Restart nginx

# systemctl restart nginx.service

Monitoring the service

You can watch the logs with a command like this

# journalctl -f -u chorus.service