Provider, Bare metal

For maximum control or homelab deployments: deploy Olympus on physical hardware you own.

Recommended hardware

Olympus itself needs <2GB RAM. The rest is for Postgres + room to grow.

Setup

1. Install Ubuntu Server 22.04 (or your preferred Linux).
2. Configure static IP / DHCP reservation.
3. Set up SSH with key auth, disable password auth.
4. Install Podman: apt install podman podman-compose.
5. Configure firewall: ufw allow 22/tcp from <admin-ip>, ufw allow 80/443/tcp, deny rest.
6. Point public DNS at your home WAN IP, or use Cloudflare Tunnel for tunneling.

Cloudflare Tunnel (no port forwarding)

If you don't want to expose ports on your home router:

# On the bare-metal host
cloudflared tunnel create olympus
cloudflared tunnel route dns olympus ciam.your-domain.com
cloudflared tunnel route dns olympus iam.your-domain.com
cloudflared tunnel run olympus

Cloudflare routes traffic through their network to your host via an outbound-only tunnel. No port forwarding needed.

Caddy still runs locally and handles TLS internally; Cloudflare terminates the public TLS.

ARM (Raspberry Pi)

Olympus images are multi-arch. A Pi 5 with 8GB RAM and a fast NVMe HAT runs Olympus for ~50 MAU comfortably.

Verify Pi-specific tooling (Podman works on Raspberry Pi OS / Ubuntu Server for ARM).

Power and uptime

• Uninterruptible power supply (UPS), even a small consumer model.
• Document your reboot/recovery procedure.
• Monitor power events (UPS notifications) → your alerting.

Backups off-site

Critical for bare-metal. The host can fail; off-site backups can't:

# Daily off-site backup
podman exec olympus-postgres pg_dumpall | gzip | rclone rcat b2:olympus-backups/$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

See Operate, Backups (Postgres).

Where next

• Deploy, Provider, Direct SSH
• Operate, Backups (Postgres)
• Cookbook, Single VPS deployment, many of the same principles apply.