"A what for the what?" -> glad you asked: Bluesky, Tangled, and a bunch of other web applications use a federated protocol called AT Protocol (atproto). Your account lives on a PDS, a server that stores your posts, profile, follows, cryptographic keys, et cetera. The beauty is that a PDS is the only place your data lives permanently - so you can navigate any atproto app knowing that your data is yours and not getting locked behind any one app's walls.

We came together to make this PDS to enable and empower our users to better host their data on this shared protocol. All of our decisions as a project are guided by their usefulness to the community: PDS hosters and end-users both.

Comparatively: Bluesky the company created a "reference PDS" that we can self-host quite easily, and that's great, but Bluesky has an incentive to make software for themselvess first & foremost, then secondly their software can be useful for us self-hosters. In contrast, Tranquil is not from a company, and will never be.

What's different about Tranquil PDS#

It is a superset of the reference PDS, including:

passkeys and 2FA: WebAuthn/FIDO2, TOTP, backup codes, trusted devices
SSO login and signup
did:web support: PDS-hosted subdomains or bring-your-own
multi-channel communication: you can be notified via email, discord, telegram, and signal for verification and alerts
granular OAuth scopes with a consent UI that allows unchecking specific scopes
app passwords with the same granular permission scope system as OAuth
account delegation: letting others manage an account with configurable permission levels
a built-in web UI for account management, repo browsing, and admin

Unlike the ref PDS, Tranquil itself is compiled to a single binary with no nodeJS runtime. However, at time of writing, Tranquil requires postgres running separately.

Quick Start#

cp example.toml config.toml
podman compose up db -d
just run

Configuration#

See example.toml for all configuration options.

NOTE

The order of configuration precedence is: environment variables, then a config file passed via --config, then /etc/tranquil-pds/config.toml, then the built-in defaults. So you can use environment variables, or a config file, or both.

Development#

Run just to see available commands.

just test
just lint

Nix users can enter a devshell with nix develop, or direnv allow to auto-enter via the bundled .envrc. Pre-built artifacts (including the devshell) are available from our binary cache.

Production Deployment#

Quick Deploy (Docker/Podman Compose)#

Edit config.toml with your values. Generate secrets with openssl rand -base64 48.

cp example.toml config.toml
podman-compose -f docker-compose.prod.yaml up -d

Installation Guides#

Community#

"Let's connect!" or whatever linkedin-types say#

We currently don't have a shared space to chat and organize Tranquil things, but we're very interested in changing that in the near future. What do you suggest? Anything but a discord server.

Core team#

Amazing contributers#

Tranquil PDS instances in the wild!#

Tranquil Farm
Your instance here!! Don't be a stranger.

Special thanks#

This project is very grateful to @nonbinary.computer, @juliet.paris, @mary.my.id, @baileytownsend.dev, and @ptr.pet for their help and their code to lean on.

License#

AGPL-3.0-or-later. Documentation is CC BY-SA 4.0. See LICENSE for details.

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