Run Olympus on a Raspberry Pi

A Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM can run Olympus for a small audience (~50 MAU). Useful for: homelab, family identity provider, no-recurring-cost personal cloud.

Hardware

Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB RAM preferred; 4GB works).
NVMe HAT with a small NVMe SSD (256GB+).
PoE+ HAT if you don't want power cabling.
Reliable power supply (5V/5A USB-C).

Approximate cost: ~$120-180 USD all-in.

OS

Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit (Bookworm) or Ubuntu Server 24.04 for ARM. Either works.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y podman podman-compose

Verify multi-arch images

Olympus images should support linux/arm64:

docker manifest inspect ghcr.io/olympusoss/athena | jq '.manifests[].platform'

If linux/arm64 is listed, you're good. If not, you'll build from source on the Pi (slow, ~30 min for a full build).

Public access

The Pi is behind your home router. Two options:

A: Port forwarding

Forward router ports 80 and 443 → Pi's local IP. Use Dynamic DNS (DuckDNS, Cloudflare DNS API) to update your DNS A record when your home IP changes.

# /etc/cron.hourly/update-dns
curl "https://www.duckdns.org/update?domains=myhome&token=YOUR_TOKEN"

B: Cloudflare Tunnel (recommended)

Outbound-only tunnel, no port forwarding required. See Cookbook, Cloudflare in front.

cloudflared tunnel create olympus-pi
cloudflared tunnel route dns olympus-pi ciam.your-domain
cloudflared tunnel run olympus-pi

Postgres

Self-host on the same Pi (managed Postgres adds cost, defeating the homelab purpose).

podman run -d --name olympus-postgres \
  -v olympus-pg-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<strong> \
  postgres:17

Daily backup to a USB external drive:

# /etc/cron.daily/olympus-backup
podman exec olympus-postgres pg_dumpall > /mnt/backup-drive/$(date +%Y%m%d).sql
find /mnt/backup-drive -name "*.sql" -mtime +30 -delete

For off-site: rsync to another Pi at a friend's house, or rclone to Backblaze ($1/mo for 100GB).

Power and uptime

UPS battery hat, Pi 5 has good ones available; ~$30. Bridges brief outages.
Watchdog, apt install watchdog and configure to reboot on hangs.

Don't expect 4-nines uptime. This is homelab.

Performance budget

For ~50 MAU with light usage:

Login flow: ~200ms (including Postgres roundtrips).
Token introspection: ~50ms.
Disk I/O: NVMe makes a big difference; don't run on SD card.

Throughput limit: ~5-10 logins/second sustained. Above that, the Pi runs out of CPU.

What this is good for

Personal SSO across your homelab (Home Assistant, Plex, Jellyfin, Frigate, etc.).
Family auth provider for shared services.
Olympus development environment.

What this is NOT good for

Production customer-facing identity (Olympus on a Pi at home is a liability for paying customers).
Anything with regulatory compliance (HIPAA, PCI-DSS).
High availability.

Deploy, Provider, Bare metal
Cookbook, Cloudflare in front
Cookbook, Single VPS deployment, similar principles, real VPS.

Run Olympus on a Raspberry Pi

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