Recently I set up a Matrix homeserver for my friend group. I considered whether I needed federation, and ultimately decided that I did. On top of that, I also had to set up a TURN server so that calls would work properly for everyone, since if someone is behind NAT, the connection typically doesn’t work reliably. I launched the container on a Hetzner cloud VPS running Debian 10.

You’ll need a running Docker service, if it’s not installed yet, you can easily install it using https://get.docker.com/. I recommend creating a git repository where you can push your docker-compose and nginx config files.

This guide applies to Ubuntu 16.04, I’ll cover other versions later.

1. Installing Nginx
First, let’s update the repos:

sudo apt-get update

Then install nginx:

sudo apt-get install nginx

Then check the nginx version with the following command:

nginx -v

If we get at least version 1.10.0, everything is fine.

2. Installing MySQL
The first step is to install the MySQL server:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Naturally, you need to fill in the root user’s password, which you’ll use to access MySQL later.
For PHP pages to run, you need to install PHP version 5 and its associated MySQL instruction set: