NetBird is open-source and can be self-hosted on your servers.

It relies on components developed by NetBird Authors Management Service, Management UI Dashboard, Signal Service, a 3rd party open-source STUN/TURN service Coturn, and an identity provider (IDP).

If you would like to learn more about the architecture please refer to the architecture section.

It might be a good idea to try NetBird before self-hosting on your servers. We run NetBird in the cloud, and it will take a few clicks to get started with our managed version. Check it out!

If you are looking for a quick way of trying self-hosted NetBird, please refer to this guide. Otherwise, continue here to set up NetBird with custom IdPs.

Requirements

• Virtual machine offered by any cloud provider (e.g., AWS, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Google Cloud, Azure ...).
• Any Linux OS.
• Docker Compose installed (see Install Docker Compose).
• jq installed. In most distributions usually available in the official repositories and can be installed with sudo apt install jq or sudo yum install jq
• Domain name pointing to the public IP address of your server.
• Open TCP ports 80, 443, 33073, 10000, 33080 (Dashboard HTTP & HTTPS, Management gRPC & HTTP APIs, Signal gRPC API, Relay respectively) on your server.
• Coturn is used for relay using the STUN/TURN protocols. It requires a listening port, UDP 3478, and range of ports, UDP 49152-65535, for dynamic relay connections. These are set as defaults in setup file, but can be configured to your requirements.
• Maybe a cup of coffee or tea :)

For this tutorial we will be using domain demo.netbird.io which points to our Ubuntu 22.04 machine hosted at Hetzner.

Step 1: Get the latest stable NetBird code

Then switch to the infra folder that contains docker-compose file:

Step 2: Prepare configuration files

To simplify the setup we have prepared a script to substitute required properties in the docker-compose.yml.tmpl and management.json.tmpl files.

The setup.env.example file contains multiple properties that have to be filled. You need to copy the example file to setup.env before updating it.

The changes made to setup.env will not take any effect until you run configure.sh (mentioned later on).

• Set NETBIRD_DOMAIN to your domain, e.g. demo.netbird.io
• Configure NETBIRD_LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL property. This can be any email address. Let’s Encrypt will create an account while generating a new certificate.

NetBird supports automatic renewal by default when using Let’s Encrypt.

If you want to setup NetBird with your own reverse-Proxy and without using the integrated letsencrypt, follow this step here instead.

Step 3: Configure Identity Provider (IDP)

NetBird supports generic OpenID (OIDC) protocol allowing integration with any IDP following the specification.

NetBird’s management service integrates with some of the most popular IDP APIs, allowing the service to cache and display user names and email addresses without storing sensitive data.

Pick the one that suits your needs, follow the steps, and continue with this guide:

Self-hosted options

• Continue with Zitadel.
• Continue with Keycloak.
• Continue with Authentik.

Managed options

• Continue with Azure AD.
• Continue with Google Workspace.
• Continue with Okta.
• Continue with Auth0.

Step 4: Disable single account mode (optional)

NetBird Management service runs in a single account mode by default since version v0.10.1. Management service was creating a separate account for each registered user before v0.10.1. Single account mode ensures that all the users signing up for your self-hosted installation will join the same account/network. In most cases, this is the desired behavior.

If you want to disable the single-account mode, set --disable-single-account-mode flag in the docker-compose.yml.tmpl command section of the management service.

Step 5: Run configuration script

Make sure all the required properties set in the setup.env file and run:

This will export all the properties as environment variables and generate artifacts/docker-compose.yml, artifacts/management.json and artifacts/turnserver.conf files substituting required variables.

The changes made to setup.env will not take any effect until you run configure.sh again

Step 6: Run docker compose:

Step 7: Check docker logs (Optional)

If you want to run NetBird behind your own reverse-proxy, some additional configuration-steps have to be taken to Step 2.

Not all reverse-proxies are supported as NetBird uses gRPC for various components.

Configuration for NetBird

In setup.env:

• Set NETBIRD_DOMAIN to your domain, e.g. demo.netbird.io
• Set NETBIRD_DISABLE_LETSENCRYPT=true
• Add NETBIRD_MGMT_API_PORT to your reverse-proxy TLS-port (default: 443)
• Add NETBIRD_SIGNAL_PORT to your reverse-proxy TLS-port

Optional:

• Add TURN_MIN_PORT and TURN_MAX_PORT to configure the port-range used by the Turn-server

The coturn-service still needs to be directly accessible under your set-domain as it uses UDP for communication.

Now you can continue with Step 3.

Configuration for your reverse-proxy

Depending on your port-mappings and choice of reverse-proxy, how you configure the forwards differs greatly.

The following endpoints have to be setup:

Endpoint	Protocol	Target service and internal-port
/	HTTP	dashboard:80
/signalexchange.SignalExchange/	gRPC	signal:80
/ws-proxy/signal	WebSocket	signal:80
/api	HTTP	management:443
/management.ManagementService/	gRPC	management:443
/ws-proxy/management	WebSocket	management:443
/relay	WebSocket	relay:33080
:33080 (UDP)	QUIC	relay:33080 (direct or L4 proxy)

Make sure your reverse-Proxy is setup to use the HTTP2-Protocol when forwarding.

The relay service supports two transport options: WebSocket (via /relay) or QUIC over UDP on port 33080 (not HTTP/3). You only need to configure one - either the WebSocket endpoint through your reverse proxy, or direct UDP access for QUIC. QUIC cannot be proxied through typical HTTP reverse proxies and must either be exposed directly or proxied using an L4 (transport layer) proxy that supports UDP. Some reverse proxies may support QUIC proxying, but this typically requires specific configuration for the custom application protocol.

You can find helpful templates with the reverse-proxy-name as suffix (e.g. docker-compose.yml.tmpl.traefik) Simply replace the file docker-compose.yml.tmpl with the chosen version.

Hetzner

Hetzner uses stateless firewall, which means it doesn’t “keep track of” whether or not an incoming packet belongs to an established connection. In this case, you may add to this server firewall an UDP port range equals to the result of:

More info can be found at this GitHub issue.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Linux images provided by Oracle Cloud includes some default firewall rules which block ingress UDP on port 3478. This is required by Coturn without which only peers in same LAN would be able to communicate with each other but not peers on different networks. Besides opening required ports on Security Rules, you also need to run below command on the virtual machine.

Oracle Cloud discourages use of UFW. You will have to use IPTABLES.

To backup your NetBird installation, you need to copy the configuration files, and the Management service databases.

The configuration files are located in the folder where you ran the installation script. To backup, copy the files to a backup location:

To save the Management service databases, you need to stop the Management service and copy the files from the store directory using a docker compose command as follows:

The users with management on version < v0.15.3 should first upgrade their systems to v0.25.9, run management to properly migrate rules to policies, and then upgrade to 0.26.0+.

To upgrade NetBird to the latest version, you need to review the release notes for any breaking changes and follow the upgrade steps below:

1. Run the backup steps described in the backup section.
2. Pull the latest NetBird docker images:
3. Restart the NetBird containers with the new images:

Feel free to ping us on Slack if you have any questions

• NetBird managed version: https://app.netbird.io
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