Tranquil PDS

A Personal Data Server for the AT Protocol.

"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 themselves 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 is a single binary with no nodejs runtime. That said, at time of writing, Tranquil does require 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)

docker-compose.prod.yaml pulls the prebuilt image atcr.io/tranquil.farm/tranquil-pds:latest. Sign in to the registry first with podman login atcr.io. The Containers guide covers building from source.

cp example.toml config.toml

Edit config.toml with your values and generate secrets with openssl rand -base64 48. Set the postgres password to match docker-compose.prod.yaml. nginx needs a TLS certificate before it starts, so follow the wildcard cert steps in the Containers guide.

podman-compose -f docker-compose.prod.yaml up -d

Installation Guides

• Nix
• Containers

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

• @oyster.cafe
• @nel.pet

Amazing contributors

• @isabelroses.com
• @quilling.dev
• @koi.rip
• @bas.sh
• @nekomimi.pet
• @islacant.win
• @a.starrysky.fyi
• @sans-self.org
• @tachyonism.tngl.sh
• @trezy.codes
• @ave.zone
• Could be your name here too!

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.