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Self hosting

Takaro is designed to be a cloud-first, highly available, and scalable platform. We recommend using our hosted solution to ensure the best experience for you and your players. This self hosting guide is provided as a reference for advanced users who wish to run Takaro on their own infrastructure.

This guide will set up a basic Takaro instance on a single server. This guide assumes you have a basic understanding of Docker and general server administration. We make a lot of assumptions about the environment in which Takaro is running, you will need to adapt this guide to your specific environment.

For simplicity, we will not cover certain aspects of running a production service in this guide, such as reverse proxy, backups, monitoring, security hardening, scaling, etc.

Prerequisites​

  • A server running Ubuntu 24.04
    • Other Linux distributions may work, but this guide is written for and tested on Ubuntu 24.04
  • Docker and Docker Compose installed
  • A domain name pointing to your server
    • You will need 2 A records, one to the top level domain (takaro.example.com) and one to the wildcard domain (*.takaro.example.com)
  • Basic unix command line utilities like git, vim, and curl will be useful

Installation​

Clone the Takaro repository to your server:

git clone https://github.com/gettakaro/takaro.git

The compose file will store a bunch of persistent data. Different containers need different permissions on these folders

./scripts/setup-data-folders.sh

There is a reference Docker compose file at deploy/compose/docker-compose.yml. Take a look at this file to see what we'll be deploying.

cd deploy/compose
cat docker-compose.yml

Copy the example .env file from the repo and edit it as needed

cp ../../.env.example .env

Now we can start the services with Docker Compose:

docker compose up -d

You should be able to access the Takaro web interface at https://takaro.your-domain.com.

Troubleshooting​

If you encounter any issues, you should always check the logs of the services you are running. You can do this with the following command:

docker compose logs -f

If you know the error is with a specific service, you can filter the logs to only show that service:

docker compose logs -f <service-name>