I’ve decided to join Bluesky, purely because I like how the federation system works and being able to keep my own data on my own server.

My setup uses NGINX as a reverse proxy since that is what I am currently using and the BlueSky PDS is hosted on a docker instance.

I followed this guide. Some things are missing from the guide, for example creating the initial pds.env file. You can use the installation script, but I didn’t want to install caddy or any other unused packages, so I modified the script and have put it on GitHub gist here.

For the NGINX configuration, put your routes under ssl:

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server {
        listen 443 ssl;
        server_name petertanner.dev;

        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/petertanner.dev/fullchain.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/petertanner.dev/privkey.pem;

        location /xrpc {
                proxy_pass http://[DOCKER IP ADDRESS]:6010;
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header Host $host;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

                # WebSocket support
                proxy_http_version 1.1;
                proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
                proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        }

        location /.well-known/atproto-did {
                default_type text/plain;
                return 200 "did:plc:[DID]";
        }

        # Note that I redirect https://petertanner.dev -> https://www.petertanner.dev for my website (anything other than the bluesky related endpoints).
        location / {
                return 301 $scheme://www.petertanner.dev$request_uri;
        }
}

I hard coded the atproto-did because I was having issues with invalid handle and also because the PDS returned User not found for some reason. This is probably not good practice but it worked.

Note that the guide puts the Bluesky data directory under /opt/pds instead of /pds

To use pdsadmin, simply copy the pdsadmin.sh script from the pds repository and make it executable. When using it with the data directory under /opt/pds, either modify the script or call it as follows: PDS_ENV_FILE=/opt/pds/pds.env ./pdsadmin.sh [...]

As stated in the guide, I had to first create an account on a “subdomain” (temp.petertanner.dev) and then change it in the account settings once logged in. Using this service I checked that the verification worked. However, even with both HTTP and DNS verified, I still got the error Failed to verify handle. Please try again. for both methods. I checked in the debug console, and it looked like bad requests were being sent to my server (400).

I did some more digging and found this answer. Using the goat tool worked great, and it resolved both the issue of not being able to change my handle and the invalid handle issues.

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goat account login -u did:plc:<did> -p <password>
goat account update-handle <domain>

You can find me on Bluesky at @petertanner.dev