UnpledgedCatnapTipper

Also, the way to include additional config files tripped me up like crazy for a good few hours, and then how to format them tripped me up for even longer, for options they don’t have examples for (like automatically joining any new accounts to a room, for example).

If you’ve got specific options you’re trying to set, I’m happy to help if I can. The documentation is atrocious for this bit, so if you’re not a kubernetes pro (I am definitely not) it is confusing!

Alright that gives me a good idea what your working with.

I am running it along side some other projects, so I already had a reverse proxy set up, so I didn’t look closely at the other parts of the guide in that section.

If you want to be able to use this server for other hosting in the future, you may want to set up a reverse proxy. I can give some advice about that if you’re interested!

In your case, if the only thing you ever want to host on this box is Matrix, you don’t need a reverse proxy. You should be able to do the steps here and it should result in a working deployment.

It looks like that should give you a tls.yaml file, which you need to include when issuing the helm command to deploy everything. This one:

helm upgrade --install --namespace "ess" ess oci://ghcr.io/element-hq/ess-helm/matrix-stack -f ~/ess-config-values/hostnames.yaml <optional additional values files to pass> --wait

You need to make sure that in the <optional> section, you include:

-f ~/ess-config-values/tls.yaml

So your command would be this, if you have no additional yaml files, and if you do, simply put “-f path/to/file” at the end, right before the “–wait”:

    helm upgrade --install --namespace "ess" ess oci://ghcr.io/element-hq/ess-helm/matrix-stack -f ~/ess-config-values/hostnames.yaml -f ~/ess-config-values/tls.yaml --wait

Ok, so that sounds like either a DNS issue or a reverse proxy issue. Did you configure your domain/subdomains to point to the public IP address of where you’re setting things up? Are you using the reverse proxy in the guide or do you already have a reverse proxy and you’re adding ESS domains to it? Did you configure port forwarding on your router?

I have had issues with accessing my locally hosted services via domain name while on the same network. My router doesn’t like to route internal traffic back to its own WAN port. Can you access it from something on a different network (cellular data)?

If you want to be able to manage it via a web page instead of config files, nginx proxy manager works well, and can be run via docker/docker compose.

https://nginxproxymanager.com/guide/

It’s not quite as simple as a single docker compose, but the Element Server Suite for hosting a matrix home server (synapse) was fairly simple to get working.

There’s an additional component, and how you deploy it depends on the method you’re deploying things. If you do the Element Server Suite (https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm) via their instructions, it includes the voice/video component and web client. If you deploy your homeserver in a different way, you should be able to find instructions for Element Call.

Synapse is the Matrix homeserver, it handles everything except for the voice/video call features.

Edit: it doesn’t handle the web client either, but technically you don’t need that for a working setup.

You will need a domain, but they can be had for a couple $ per year.

As for hosting on synology, I don’t know how difficult it is. I used the Element Server Suite on a Debian VM, and aside from some minor issues getting email and automatic room joining working it was pretty simple following their guides.