Deploy Lurker on DigitalOcean (one-shot)

Stand up a public, HTTPS-enabled Lurker on a fresh DigitalOcean droplet from a single pasted script — no SSH required.

Steps

1. Create a droplet — the Docker Marketplace image at the smallest size is fine (vanilla Ubuntu 24.04 LTS works too).
2. At droplet creation, expand Additional Options and enable User Scripts (DigitalOcean's label for cloud-init user data — older guides call it "User data" or "Startup scripts"). Paste in the contents of deploy/digitalocean-cloud-init.sh, after filling in the two required values near the top of the script — LURKER_DOMAIN (your domain, e.g. irc.yourdomain.com) and ADMIN_EMAIL (your email address).
3. Once the droplet exists, copy its public IP and add a DNS A record pointing your domain at it.
4. Give it a few minutes, then visit your domain.

You don't need the droplet's IP before creating it: the droplet boots and starts Caddy before DNS exists, and Caddy keeps retrying Let's Encrypt until your A record resolves — so HTTPS comes up automatically a few minutes after you set the DNS record. (If you'd rather the certificate be ready the moment the droplet boots, reserve a Reserved IP first, point DNS at it, then create the droplet and assign that Reserved IP.)

Passkeys and web push notifications are configured automatically — the deploy derives the WebAuthn and push settings from your domain and email — so you can enable them per device from Lurker's in-app settings without touching the server.

Deploy progress is logged to /var/log/lurker-deploy.log on the droplet.

Updating

SSH in (or open the DigitalOcean web console) and run:

cd /opt/lurker
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

The deploy script records the Caddy overlay in .env, so docker compose picks it up automatically — no -f flags needed. Your data/ directory is left untouched.

Going further

For backups, admin-password recovery, and other operational details, see the self-hosting guide.