Multi-instance PocketBase setup

I’ve been playing around with Hetzner Cloud for a while now, mainly setting up this site on it using Coolify but it got me thinking about using it for other things too.

I’ve used PocketBase before for other projects and documented it for use with Fly.io. This time round, I’m using a Hetzner VPS.

Now, the PocketBase binary is like 38mb so using a a VPS with a 40gb SSD is a bit overkill for the small amount of data I’m storing for the toy projects I’m working on. I have several small projects that I want to use PocketBase for, so, instead of setting up a new box for each one, I thought I’d try to set up a multi-instance setup.

Pre-requisites

I’ve already done this, I’m documenting for future me. If you’re thinking about doing something similar bear in mind that I already have a VPS box set up on Hetzner and some domains (on Cloudflare) that I’m going to proxy to.

Shiny new box

Aight, so, new Hetzner box, I’m going to SSH into it and update it. Just a side note here I’ve started using the 1Password CLI for SSH keys and it is really handy.

Update the box:

apt update
apt upgrade -y
apt update && apt upgrade -y && apt autoremove -y

Yes, I’m not using a sudoers account! Rawdogging it as root. If you’re interested I go through Setting up my VPS on Hetzner which set’s up a user account on the sudoers list and removes the root user.

Download PocketBase

Ok, so I want to download PocketBase to the box, I’ll get the latest PocketBase binary listed on the PocketBase docs I’m on ARM64 so I’ll get that with wget.

wget https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/releases/download/v0.22.19/pocketbase_0.22.19_linux_arm64.zip

Unzip the binary, I’m going to use unzip, which isn’t installed by default on Ubuntu, so I’ll install it:

apt install unzip

Create project directories

I’m going to create a couple of directories for the projects I’m setting up, rinku-cloud and dope-devs.

mkdir {rinku-cloud,dope-devs}

Then move the PocketBase zip file into the dope-devs directory and unzip it.

mv pocketbase_0.22.19_linux_arm64.zip dope-devs/
cd dope-devs/
unzip pocketbase_0.22.19_linux_arm64.zip

Same thing for the rinku-cloud directory.

mv pocketbase_0.22.19_linux_arm64.zip ../rinku-cloud/
cd ../
cd rinku-cloud/
unzip pocketbase_0.22.19_linux_arm64.zip

Set up services

I want to set up two services to run on localhost for the two projects and assign a port for each. I’ll just go through the process of setting up one service, NOTE that for the other service I’ll need to change the port number.

Create the service file using nano:

nano /etc/systemd/system/pocketbase-rinku-cloud.service

Then edit the file and add in the service details:

[Unit]
Description=PocketBase Rinku Cloud
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
Group=root
ExecStart=/root/rinku-cloud/pocketbase serve --http="127.0.0.1:8090"
WorkingDirectory=/root/rinku-cloud
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Write out the file, save it and exit. I’ll then enable the service, start it and check the status.

systemctl enable pocketbase-rinku-cloud.service
systemctl start pocketbase-rinku-cloud.service
systemctl status pocketbase-rinku-cloud.service

I get an output looking something like this:

● pocketbase-rinku-cloud.service - PocketBase Rinku Cloud
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/pocketbase-rinku-cloud.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sat 2024-08-17 19:46:40 UTC; 1min 4s ago
   Main PID: 708 (pocketbase)
      Tasks: 8 (limit: 4433)
     Memory: 44.6M (peak: 44.9M)
        CPU: 619ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/pocketbase-rinku-cloud.service
             └─708 /root/rinku-cloud/pocketbase serve --http=127.0.0.1:8090

Install and config Caddy

I’m going to go to the Caddy documentation for Ubuntu and copy pasta the commands for installing Caddy.

sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https curl
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install caddy

Change directory into the etc folder and create a Caddyfile.

cd /etc/caddy/
nano Caddyfile

In the Caddyfile I’m going to add in the two domains I’m proxying NOTE that I have already added an A record for pb in my DNS records for the domains that points back to my Hetzner IP address.

pb.rinku.cloud {
  reverse_proxy localhost:8090
}

pb.dopedevs.icu {
  reverse_proxy localhost:8091
}

Write out the file, save it and exit. I’ll then enable the Caddy service, start it and check the status.

systemctl enable caddy
systemctl start caddy
systemctl status caddy

Login to PocketBase

Now my services are running I can now login to PocketBase for each of the projects and get them configured how I want.

Conclusion

I’ve now got a multi-instance PocketBase setup running on Hetzner Cloud with Caddy as a reverse proxy.