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selfhost-buzz

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Selfhost https://buzz.xyz

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# selfhost-buzz

Run your own [Buzz](https://github.com/block/buzz) Nostr relay on a machine you
own, reachable only over your [Tailscale](https://tailscale.com) network.

Buzz is a Nostr relay plus a platform for AI agents that live in your chats.
Hosting it yourself means your messages, uploads and agent traffic stay on your
own hardware.

## Why Tailscale

A relay has to be reachable to be useful, but you almost certainly don't want to
expose one to the open internet — that means port forwarding, a public DNS
record, certificate management and an attack surface.

Tailscale sidesteps all of it. The relay joins your private network as its own
machine, gets a stable name like `buzz.tail1a2b3.ts.net` and a real Let's
Encrypt certificate, and is reachable from every device signed into your
Tailscale account — laptop, phone, anywhere in the world — while remaining
completely invisible to everyone else. Nothing is published to the host and no
router config is needed.

That's the whole ingress story here: `tailscale serve` terminates TLS and
proxies to the relay. If a device isn't on your tailnet, the relay may as well
not exist.

## What runs

```
  <you, anywhere on your tailnet>
             │  wss:// + https://
             ▼
  buzz.<your-tailnet>.ts.net   ── Tailscale node (TLS terminated here)
             │
             ├─ /      ──►  buzz         relay
             └─ /pair  ──►  buzz-pair    device pairing sidecar (NIP-AB)
                              │
                              ├──►  buzz-postgres   events, members, channels
                              ├──►  buzz-redis      pub/sub fan-out
                              └──►  buzz-minio      media uploads + git objects
```

Nothing binds a host port. The Tailscale container is the only way in.

## Requirements

- Docker with Compose v2
- A Tailscale account (the free tier is plenty)
- A machine that stays on — a spare Mac, a NUC, a home server, a VPS
- A Nostr identity, which the [Buzz app](https://github.com/block/buzz) creates
  for you on first launch

## Docs

- [docs/tailscale.md](docs/tailscale.md) — setting up a tailnet, creating the
  auth key, sharing the relay with other people
- [docs/local-llm.md](docs/local-llm.md) — pointing agents at Ollama or LM
  Studio instead of a hosted API

---

## Setup

### 1. Set up Tailscale

**Full walkthrough: [docs/tailscale.md](docs/tailscale.md)** — start there if
you don't already have a tailnet. The short version:

1. Install Tailscale on the host machine and on every device you want to use
   Buzz from, signing them all into the same account.
2. In the [admin console](https://login.tailscale.com/admin) **DNS page**,
   enable **MagicDNS** and **HTTPS Certificates**, and note your **tailnet
   name** — `tail1a2b3.ts.net`, or a word pair like `honey-bee.ts.net`.
3. On the **Keys page**, generate an auth key with **Reusable** ticked. A
   one-shot key works exactly once, and every later container restart then
   fails with `invalid key: API key does not exist`.

### 2. Configure

```bash
git clone https://github.com/ciram-co/selfhost-buzz
cd selfhost-buzz
scripts/setup.sh
```

That writes a `.env` with all the random secrets already generated. Open it and
fill in the three things only you can provide:

| Variable | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| `TS_TAILNET` | your tailnet name, e.g. `tail1a2b3.ts.net` |
| `TS_AUTHKEY` | the reusable auth key from step 1 |
| `BUZZ_RELAY_OWNER_PUBKEY` | your own Nostr pubkey, 64-char **hex** (not `npub`) |

Everything public is derived from `TS_TAILNET`, so there's exactly one place to
change if you rename things:

```
BUZZ_HOSTNAME=buzz  +  TS_TAILNET=tail1a2b3.ts.net
        └──►  wss://buzz.tail1a2b3.ts.net          relay
              https://buzz.tail1a2b3.ts.net/media  uploads
              https://buzz.tail1a2b3.ts.net/pair   device pairing
```

`BUZZ_RELAY_OWNER_PUBKEY` is you — the account that administers the relay. In
the Buzz desktop app it's under your profile; copy the hex form, not the `npub`
form. Note this is **different** from `BUZZ_RELAY_PRIVATE_KEY`, which is the
relay's own identity and is generated for you. Keep them separate: the relay
signs its own events, and it shouldn't do that with your personal key.

### 3. Start it

```bash
docker compose up -d
scripts/check.sh
```

First boot takes a minute or two — the database migrates, MinIO runs a
conformance probe, and Tailscale provisions a certificate. `scripts/check.sh`
tells you whether the relay is answering at its public address.

### 4. Let yourself in

The relay ships closed: only pubkeys you've explicitly added can connect.

```bash
scripts/members.sh add <your-npub-or-hex> admin
scripts/members.sh list
```

Add people one at a time, a couple of seconds apart. The roster is published as
a single signed event, and simultaneous adds can overwrite each other.

### 5. Connect a client

In the Buzz app, add your relay: `wss://buzz.<your-tailnet>.ts.net`

For a phone, use **Settings → Pair device** in the desktop app — that's what
the `/pair` sidecar is for. The phone has to be on your tailnet too.

---

## Everyday use

```bash
docker compose up -d           # start
docker compose down            # stop (keeps all data)
docker compose ps              # status
docker compose logs -f buzz    # follow relay logs

scripts/check.sh               # is it reachable?
scripts/members.sh list        # who's allowed on
scripts/backup.sh              # dump the database to backups/
scripts/reset-data.sh          # wipe all data, keep the hostname
```

### Upgrading

```bash
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
```

Pin `BUZZ_VERSION` rather than tracking `main`. Buzz publishes **`sha-<7>`
image tags, not semver** — `ghcr.io/block/buzz:v0.4.25` doesn't exist. Resolve
a release to its tag:

```bash
gh api repos/block/buzz/commits/v0.4.25 --jq .sha   # take the first 7 chars
# -> BUZZ_VERSION=sha-e8105d1
```

Postgres, Redis and MinIO are pinned in `docker-compose.yml`. Bumping Redis or
MinIO is routine; **bumping Postgres across a major version is not** — the new
server refuses to start on a data directory written by the old one. Dump first
(`scripts/backup.sh`), start clean, and restore.

### Backups

`scripts/backup.sh` covers the database, which holds messages, channels and
members. Uploaded media lives in the MinIO volume and isn't included — back up
the `selfhost-buzz_buzz-minio-data` volume separately if you care about it.

The values in `.env` matter more than either. `BUZZ_RELAY_PRIVATE_KEY` **is**
your relay's identity — regenerate it and every client sees a different relay.
Save `.env` somewhere safe and don't commit it.

---

## Running agents against a local LLM

Agents can run against Ollama or LM Studio on your own hardware instead of a
hosted API.

**Full walkthrough: [docs/local-llm.md](docs/local-llm.md)** — covers the model
server on the same machine, on another machine over Tailscale, or in Docker.

Two things to know up front:

- **The relay never calls the LLM.** Agents run inside the Buzz *desktop app*,
  so the endpoint has to be reachable from the machine running the app, and
  putting these variables in `docker-compose.yml` does nothing.
- **Pick a model that reliably emits tool calls.** Agents reply by *calling a
  tool*, not by producing prose. A model that decides "no tool call needed" and
  answers in plain text produces total silence in the chat — the harness
  discards the prose. If an agent goes quiet while the LLM is clearly being
  hit, this is almost always why; switch models before debugging anything else.

Agents are also chatty by design: reactions, typing indicators, presence and
telemetry mean a single "hi" can produce a dozen relay events. That's normal.

---

## Gotchas

Things that cost real time to work out:

- **Never `docker compose down -v`.** The `buzz-tailscale-state` volume *is*
  the node's machine identity. Delete it and Tailscale registers a new machine;
  since the old node still holds the name, yours becomes `buzz-1` and the URL
  silently breaks for every client. Recovering means deleting the stale node in
  the admin console, then waiting ~30s for a fresh certificate. Use
  `scripts/reset-data.sh` when you want a clean slate — it keeps the identity.

- **Passwords must be hex, not base64.** They're interpolated straight into
  `DATABASE_URL` and `REDIS_URL`, and a `/` from `openssl rand -base64` breaks
  URL parsing with a thoroughly misleading `invalid port number`.
  `scripts/setup.sh` generates hex.

- **Changing `BUZZ_POSTGRES_PASSWORD` after first boot doesn't take.** Postgres
  only applies it when initialising an empty data directory. Run
  `ALTER ROLE buzz WITH PASSWORD '...'` inside the container as well.

- **The auth key must be reusable**, or only the first container start ever
  succeeds.

- **Use MinIO, not an AWS mock.** Buzz's git-on-object-storage needs
  linearizable conditional writes, and localstack-style emulators don't
  guarantee them. `BUZZ_GIT_CONFORMANCE_PROBE` gates startup on exactly this,
  and the relay refuses to start if the backend fails it.

- **The `/pair` sidecar is a separate binary.** It ships in the same image but
  the relay doesn't serve it, so without the `buzz-pair` service, device
  pairing fails with a 404 that gives no hint as to why.

- **Wiping the database also wipes the member list.** With closed relay mode
  on, everyone — including your agents — is locked out until you re-add them.

---

## Troubleshooting

### "Community rejected: Load failed"

The desktop client reports nearly every failure this way — it's WebKit's
generic message, with no status code. Start by finding out whether the request
reaches the relay at all:

```bash
BUZZ_RUST_LOG='buzz_relay=info,tower_http=debug' docker compose up -d --force-recreate buzz
docker logs buzz --since 2m | grep "processing request"
```

- **Requests appear** → it's an HTTP or CORS problem. Note that a CORS block
  still reaches the server and gets logged; only the browser discards the
  response.
- **Nothing appears** → the failure is below HTTP, so CORS is ruled out. Since
  `tailscale serve` terminates TLS before proxying, a TLS failure also leaves
  no log. Compare `tailscale status` byte counters across a retry to tell
  "never left the machine" from "TLS failed".

**On macOS, check Local Network permission first.** macOS 15+ requires apps to
be granted permission before they can reach Tailscale `100.x` addresses — and
terminal `curl` already has it while a GUI app does not. The symptom is
maddening: `curl` works perfectly, the app fails, and the relay logs show
nothing at all. Fix it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local
Network.

### The hostname became `buzz-1`

The Tailscale state volume was deleted. Remove the stale `buzz` node in the
[admin console](https://login.tailscale.com/admin/machines), restart the
container, and give it about 30 seconds to get a new certificate.

### `502 Bad Gateway`

The Tailscale sidecar is proxying to itself. Its `hostname:` must not collide
with the relay's service name — that's why it's `buzz-ts` here while
`TS_HOSTNAME` carries the tailnet-visible name.

### Relay won't start: `Permission denied` on `/data/git`

The `buzz-git-data-init` one-shot didn't run. The image runs as uid 1000 but
Docker creates fresh volumes as root, so that container chowns the volume
first. Check `docker compose ps -a` for it.

---

## License

MIT — see [LICENSE](LICENSE).

This repo is deployment configuration only. Buzz itself is a separate project;
see [block/buzz](https://github.com/block/buzz) for its own license and docs.

selfhost-buzz

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