Kyle Roth

This is how I set up my own Matrix server with Docker.These instructions were originally for ARM, back when I ran this server on a Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, the Matrix community stopped releasing ARM images, so the latest version that will work on ARM without QEMU is v1.26.0, which is very old now. These instructions have been updated to use amd64 images, but I’ll preserve the references to ARM images as comments. If you’re going to work from a Pi, be sure to switch it to run in 64-bit mode for optimal performance: echo 'arm_64bit=1' | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt && sudo systemctl reboot. There is an Ansible playbook that’s quite popular, but I host a lot of other services with Docker on the same server and I wanted to continue managing all of them together, just with docker-compose.

Matrix is a federated, open source chat system. Federation means that people can message each other across different servers, like in the image below. In that way, it works sort of like email: even though you may use you@gmail.com and I might use me@kylrth.com, we can still write each other emails. In our case, I host the server at matrix.kylrth.com, and you and I can connect to it with various clients. We can write each other messages, but we can also communicate with people on other Matrix servers.There are a ton of cool features to Matrix, such as bridging, voice and video calls, and encryption. You can read a more extensive beginner’s guide to Matrix here. Also check out the Matrix website.