Deploy RomM on Pethost in one click

What happens

1. You sign in to Pethost or make an account, with a passkey, GitHub or Google.
2. No machine yet? You pick a plan, and we prepare one for you. The link waits in your browser until it is ready.
3. New project opens at the app, and you click Create project.
4. In a minute or two the app is live at its own address with HTTPS. Its secrets are made for it at random, and its data is in the nightly backup.
5. It is a project like any other: its compose.yaml, its .env, its logs and a terminal are in the panel, and your agent can change it, roll it back or restore it.

First steps

Open the address and go through the setup wizard: pick your platforms, then create the admin account. Do it right away: until then the page is open to whoever has the address. Games go into /romm/library/roms/<platform> in the romm service, for example roms/snes: copy them over SFTP or upload them in RomM, then run a scan. Keys of metadata services, such as IGDB_CLIENT_ID and IGDB_CLIENT_SECRET, go into the project’s .env; deploy again after.

What it runs

The template is this compose.yaml and the variables it writes into the project’s .env. Pethost runs the file as it is written.

services:
  romm:
    image: rommapp/romm:5
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy
    # Metadata services' keys (IGDB_CLIENT_ID, SCREENSCRAPER_USER, ...) go into .env.
    env_file: .env
    environment:
      ROMM_BASE_URL: ${URL}
      ROMM_AUTH_SECRET_KEY: ${ROMM_AUTH_SECRET_KEY}
      # TLS ends at the machine's proxy, which says so in X-Forwarded-Proto.
      ROMM_SESSION_SECURE_COOKIE: "true"
      DB_HOST: db
      DB_NAME: romm
      DB_USER: romm
      DB_PASSWD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      # Matches games by their files' hashes, with no key, as RomM's own compose file does.
      HASHEOUS_API_ENABLED: "true"
      # Four API workers by default; two are plenty for a household and leave memory to the
      # machine's other projects.
      WEB_SERVER_CONCURRENCY: "2"
    # The image declares /romm a volume: the library, assets, resources and config are in it.
    volumes:
      - romm:/romm
      - redis-data:/redis-data
    # The page answers once the first start's migrations are done.
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "wget", "-q", "-O", "/dev/null", "http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/heartbeat"]
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 180s

  db:
    image: mariadb:11.8
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MARIADB_DATABASE: romm
      MARIADB_USER: romm
      MARIADB_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${DB_ROOT_PASSWORD}
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "healthcheck.sh", "--connect", "--innodb_initialized"]
      interval: 5s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 12
      start_period: 60s

volumes:
  romm:
  redis-data:
  db:

compose.yamlSee it on GitHub