Manual installation

Run DrFed on your own server to develop and debug ActivityPub apps.

Install from npm

Install Node.js 26 or newer, then install DrFed from npm in a directory where you want to run it:

npm install @drfed/drfed

The package provides drfed-server, drfed-account, drfed-migrate, and drfed-web. Use npx to run these commands from the installation directory.

Create an account and start DrFed

Create your account before starting the server:

npx drfed-account create --data-path .pgdata \
  --email alice@example.com --name "Alice"

Replace the email address and display name with your own. The command prepares the database in .pgdata/. Start DrFed with the same data directory:

npx drfed-server --root-origin http://drfed.localhost:8888 \
  --data-path .pgdata --mail-log-content

Open http://drfed.localhost:8888 and sign in with your email address. This local example prints the login link in the server log. Follow it to finish signing in. The server includes the web frontend and stores your data in .pgdata/. Press Ctrl+C to stop it.

For a public deployment, configure your domain, wildcard DNS for instance subdomains, HTTPS, and a mail delivery transport. See Configuration and Self-hosting for settings, account creation, and database maintenance.

Other installation options

To make the commands available directly on your PATH, install globally:

npm install --global @drfed/drfed

Then run drfed-server and the other commands without npx. To build DrFed yourself, see Run from source.