deploying.md

Setting up Fedimint federation

This guide is meant for users interested in being Fedimint guardians and setting up own federation.

Target audience

Using an existing Fedimint federation as an user is easy and comes down to downloading a client application on a device like a phone.

Setting up and maintaining Federation is more challenging as it requires better understanding of its architecture and handling of its server side components.

In near future we expect many hosted Fedimint solutions, which should make setting up federations relatively easy.

Self-hosting your own federation is preferable. It is very similar to self-hosting any other software and requires some technical understanding in this area.

Overview

What federation really is are 4 or more Guardians independently running fedimintd server software.

A fedimintd setup requires:

• setting DNS domain
• prunned bitcoind node
• TLS termination software like caddy or nginx

In addition, a practical federation requires a Lightning Gateway to join the federation, and someone needs to set it up and run, though one gateway can join and server multiple federations.

A ln-gateway setup requires:

• an unprunned bitcoind node
• possibly setting up lightning node

Guides

Due to diverse nature of server-side software, it is impossible to come up with a single guide that would cover all scenarios. We are trying to create and maintain guides for variety of cases.

For help please try Fedimint Github Discussions or #mint-ops channel on Fedimint dev chat.

Please see following guides:

• Fedimint Mutinynet Setup Guide - a detailed guide setting up both Fedimint and Lightning Gateway using docker
• Fedimint NixOS Deployment Repo - an example template for setting up Fedimint using NixOS server.