Installation

Get Based running on your VPS in under a minute. You need a server with SSH access and a domain.

Prerequisites

A VPS (any provider — Scaleway, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, etc.) with SSH access. Based installs Docker and Nginx automatically.

A domain with two DNS A records pointing to your VPS IP:

based.yourdomain.com     → YOUR_VPS_IP
*.based.yourdomain.com   → YOUR_VPS_IP

Install the CLI

One command — requires bun and git:

terminal
curl -fsSL https://based.weirdscience.dev/install.sh | sh

Or from the repo:

terminal
git clone https://github.com/WeirdScience-dev/based.git
cd based && bun install && bun run setup

Initialize your server

Point Based at your VPS. This installs Docker, Nginx, deploys the container, and generates your admin key.

terminal
based init YOUR_VPS_IP --domain based.yourdomain.com

The admin key is saved in ~/.based/config.json. You never need to type it again.

Options

terminal
based init <host> --domain <domain>

Options:
  -u, --user <user>          SSH user (default: ubuntu)
  -i, --identity <path>      SSH key (default: ~/.ssh/id_ed25519)
  --remote-dir <path>        Install directory (default: /var/www/based)
  --skip-ssl                 Skip SSL setup

What happens during init

The CLI connects via SSH and:

  1. Installs Docker and Nginx if not present
  2. Syncs the Based server code via rsync
  3. Generates a random admin key
  4. Builds and starts the Docker container
  5. Configures Nginx for wildcard subdomain routing
  6. Saves the config to ~/.based/config.json