Running Farcaster Hubble on Your Home Cloud

Editor’s Note: This article was written when our product was known as Terminus. As of our rebranding, we are now Olares.

Farcaster is a cutting-edge protocol designed for building decentralized social applications, offering a robust and secure foundation for user-centric social networking. Hubble, its reference implementation, empowers you to create and manage your own private instance of the Farcaster network.

This guide walks you through the simple process of setting up Hubble on your home cloud using Terminus, a free self-hosted operating system powered by Kubernetes. Terminus streamlines the installation process, allowing you to deploy Hubble with just a click and zero complex configurations.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have a functioning Hubble instance running on your home cloud, contributing to the broader decentralized social web.

Before you begin

Before diving into the setup process, make sure you have the following:

• A Terminus instance (1.6.0 or later). Refer to the Terminus documentation to learn how to install Terminus.
• Sufficient hardware resources as required by Hubble.
• CPU: 4 cores
• RAM: 16G
• Storage: 200G. We recommend 300G or larger, as the local Facaster instance keeps getting bigger over time.

That’s it. Terminus handles the rest requirements by Hubble like public IP address and RPC endpoints for blockchain interactions (Ethereum and Optimism Mainnet in this case).

Step 1. Launch Terminus and Install Hubble

The installation is pretty straightforward:

1. Launch Terminus in your browser and open the Market.
2. In Market, find Hubble in the Social Network category, and click Get > Install.

Wait a few seconds for the installation to finish. When it’s done, Hubble will automatically start fetching Farcaster nodes to your local.

Step 2. Monitor the Synchronization Process

The Farcaster instance sync may take some time depending on your network. You can use Control Hub, a built-in system monitoring app, to view the sync status.

1. Open ControlHub in the Terminus app launcher.
2. In the Browse view, locate the FarcasterHubble container.
3. Click the log icon to view the sync log.

• Sync in progress: The logs with a progress bar indicating the synchronization process. This may take some time, depending on your network speed and the number of nodes being synchronized.
• Sync completed: Once the sync is complete, you will see detailed logs for each message, confirming that the synchronization is successful.

Step 3. Configure the Hubble Dashboard

Hubble uses Grafana for monitoring. To monitor your local Farcaster instance, configure the Hubble Dashboard as below:

1. From the Terminus Desktop, open the Hubble application, and sign in using the default account password.
2. Go to Settings > Data Source > Add New Data Source,
3. Select Graphite and set the URL to http://0.0.0.0:80.
4. Click Save & Test at the bottom of the page to ensure the data source is working correctly.
5. Navigate to Settings > Dashboard > Add New > Import.
6. In the Import from Panel JSON field, paste the contents of the Default Grafana Dashboard provided by Hubble, and then Click Import > Load to finish importing the dashboard.

Now you should be able to see the real-time status of your Farcaster instance. Note that you must finish the node synchronization as described in Step 2 to see the metrics to see the metrics with statistics. Otherwise, most sections will display No Data.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully set up and run Hubble on your home cloud.

Share your Hubble host address

Terminus streamlines access to your Hubble instance by automatically assigning it a unique subdomain. This makes it easy to share your Hubble dashboard and API with others.

Follow these steps to get your host addresses:

1. Get Hubble’s route ID in Desktop > Settings > Application > Farcasterhubble. 
2. Construct the URL for the end point. Terminus provides a predictable URL structure using App's route ID + endpoint position index (when applicable)+ .your Terminus domain name. For example, assume your domain name is xxx.myterminus.com:

• The URL for the Hubble dashboard (at index position 0) would be: https://fb26dcfd0.xxx.myterminus.com/
• The URL for the Hubble API host (at index position 2) would be: https://fb26dcfd2.xxx.myterminus.com/

Conclusion

By following this guide, you’ve successfully set up and run Hubble on your home cloud using Terminus. This setup allows you to utilize idle resources for a decentralized social network while still enjoying other services like video streaming and local AI.

Originally published at Medium on Aug 9, 2024.