Hosting your own relay

You don’t have to use the public relay — the relay server (forge-server) is part of the repo and self-hostable too. It handles lobbies, matchmaking, and message relay between players; it never runs games itself.

FORGE_SERVER_KEY=<pick-a-key> cargo run --release -p forge-server

It listens for WebSocket connections on port 9443 (override with FORGE_PORT) and serves a health endpoint on 9444. Point your node and your clients at it with ws://your-host:9443 — or put it behind a TLS-terminating proxy and use wss://. The key you pick is the same one your nodes pass as SELF_HOSTED_NODE_SERVER_KEY.

A Dockerfile is available at forge-engine/crates/forge-server/Dockerfile, and compose.production.yml in the repo root shows a complete relay + node deployment behind Caddy.