Self-Host Guide

This section covers customer-operated SynckHub Free Self-Hosting and the separate SynckHub-managed deployment model.

It is operations-first: topology, secrets, deploy workflow, recovery, and integrations.

Customer-operated Free Self-Hosting

Start with:

1. start-here/managed-federation-model.md
2. deployment/free-self-hosting-compose.md

The free entitlement permits five active human users. Authentication, authorization, signing keys, database, blobs, and backups stay on the customer host. Common provides directory, entitlement, routing, and federation coordination but has no credential that can sign in to the data plane.

The remaining Ansible, Vault, multi-service, and integration runbooks in this section describe SynckHub-managed deployments. They are not instructions for Free Self-Hosting and must not be used to install vendor access on a customer-operated host.

What changed in the platform

Self-hosting now has to cover more than “run the web app and a database.” Current SynckHub deployments may include:

• Common control-plane wiring and infra-token lifecycle
• desktop-assisted file flows and tus uploads
• Office WOPI or Yjs coauthoring
• public shared-link routing
• mail and calendar OAuth or webhook surfaces
• optional federation and structured-data features

That means operational discipline matters more now. A casual compose setup is not a deployment model.

SynckHub-managed deployment path

1. start-here/deployment-models-and-scope.md
2. start-here/prerequisites-checklist.md
3. deployment/quickstart-new-vm.md
4. deployment/config-and-inventory.md
5. deployment/release-and-maintenance-workflow.md
6. deployment/common-and-infra-registration.md

Ongoing operations path

1. operations/backups-and-restore.md
2. operations/monitoring-and-health.md
3. operations/secrets-and-rotations.md
4. operations/troubleshooting.md

Integrations path

1. integrations/office-coauthoring.md
2. integrations/yjs-coauthoring.md