Tranquil PDS
A Personal Data Server for the AT Protocol.
Bluesky runs on a federated protocol called AT Protocol. Your account lives on a PDS, a server that stores your posts, profile, follows, and cryptographic keys. Bluesky hosts one for you at bsky.social, but you can run your own. Self-hosting means you control your data; you're not dependent on any company's servers, and your account + data is actually yours.
This particular PDS thrives under harsh conditions. It is a dandelion growing through the cracks in the sidewalk concrete.
It has full compatibility with Bluesky's reference PDS: same endpoints, same behavior, same client compatibility. Everything works: repo operations, blob storage, firehose, OAuth, handle resolution, account migration, the lot.
Another excellent PDS is Cocoon, written in go.
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 (email, discord, telegram, signal) for verification and alerts, granular OAuth scopes with a consent UI showing human-readable descriptions, app passwords with granular permissions (read-only, post-only, or custom scopes), account delegation (letting others manage an account with configurable permission levels), automatic backups (configurable retention and frequency, one-click restore), and a built-in web UI for account management, OAuth consent, repo browsing, and admin.
The PDS itself is a single small binary with no node/npm runtime. It requires postgres and stores blobs on the local filesystem. Valkey is optional (enables distributed rate limiting for multi-node setups).
Quick Start
cp .env.example .env
podman compose up -d
just run
Configuration
See .env.example for all configuration options.
Development
Run just to see available commands.
just test
just lint
Production Deployment
Quick Deploy (Docker/Podman Compose)
Edit .env.prod with your values. Generate secrets with openssl rand -base64 48.
cp .env.prod.example .env.prod
podman-compose -f docker-compose.prod.yaml up -d
Installation Guides
| Guide | Best For |
|---|---|
| Debian | Debian 13+ with systemd |
| Containers | Podman with quadlets or OpenRC |
| Kubernetes | You know what you're doing |
Maintainers to ping
Thanks
This project is very grateful to @nonbinary.computer, @juli.ee, @mary.my.id, and @baileytownsend.dev 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.