Self-Host a Seed Website

Hosted on gabo.es via the Hypermedia Protocol.

If you want to publish on your own domain without relying on our service, you are welcome to self-host your site. If you are currently hosted on the hyper.media service, you always have the freedom to self-host. With Seed Hypermedia, your content is yours, your domain is yours, and your identity is always yours!

This guide is a bit technical, but it will allow you to publish on the web with complete freedom from any single company.

You will need:

The free Seed Hypermedia Desktop app (download here)

A linux server with ~2GB of RAM

Domain name

First, Create your Site Content

In the Seed app, create an account and save your secret 12 words. Keep these words safe! Anybody with these secret words can publish to your site.

Edit your home document (homepage), add content, and create sub-pages. The desktop app allows you to see what your site looks like, before you set up your own domain+server.

Prepare Your Server+Domain

We recommend a dedicated Virtual Private Server (VPS) with at least 2GB of RAM. There are a number of providers who offer these servers, and we often use Digital Ocean.

You will also need to buy a domain name from a domain registrar.

Point Domain to Your Server

Go into your DNS settings. Add an "A" record for your domain, usually with an @ symbol for the "name" to specify the domain root, and set the "value" to the IP address of your VPS server.

Run Setup Script on the Server

From the command line, log in to your server with ssh root@SERVER_IP. Then use the root password or public key authentication to securely log in.

Now, run the following command (be sure to replace example.com with your domain):

sh <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/seed-hypermedia/seed/main/website_deployment.sh) https://example.com --auto-update

The setup script will run for a few minutes, and will eventually output a secret registration URL.

Publish your Site

From the desktop app, open your site and go to the top right options dropdown, and select "Publish Site"

Paste in the secret registration URL, and click "Publish". After a few moments, your self-hosted site will be live!

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