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Server Setup

Spacebar-server setup ranges in difficulty depending on how you want to configure your system. This page provides a minimal setup guide to get you up and running, you should check out the other pages on this site to take your instance to the next level.

For this guide, we assume you're familar with the terminal.

We do not recommend or support running Spacebar using services such as Ngrok or Heroku.
You must have access to a terminal for this guide.

We do not recommend using Windows to run Spacebar.

Dependencies

  • Git
  • NodeJS. Version 18+ (for npm, node commands)
  • Python. Version 3.10 or later. Make sure this is executable via python in your terminal.
    (See: python-is-python3 package)
  • On Linux: gcc/g++. Packaged with build-essential on Debian/Ubuntu and base-devel on Arch.
  • On Windows: Visual Studio (NOT VSCode) with the Desktop development with C++ package. You do not need the full Visual Studio install, the build tools are fine.

Setup

In your terminal:

# Download Spacebar
git clone https://github.com/spacebarchat/server.git

# Navigate to project root
cd server

# Install javascript packages
npm i

# Build and generate schema. Separately, they are `build` and `generate:schema`.
npm run setup

# Start the bundle server ( API, CDN, Gateway in one )
npm run start

If all went according to plan, you can now access your new Spacebar instance at http://localhost:3001! Congrats!

If you set up your server remotely, you can use curl http://localhost:3001/api/ping to verify the server is up and running, (you should set up a reverse proxy, next!).

Now what?

Well, now you can configure Spacebar to your liking!