This is a guide for installing The Things Stack Enterprise or Open Source on your own hardware, to run your own private LoRaWAN network server.
There are several ways to run The Things Stack.
The Things Stack Open Source and Enterprise distributions are designed to run on your own hardware, which this guide covers.
Alternatively, to use The Things Stack in the cloud without installing it on your own hardware, see The Things Stack Cloud (our professional, SLA-backed offering) or Community Edition (our free-to-use community edition). To spin up your own EC2 instance, there is also an AWS Launcher. To install using balenaCloud on a Rasperry Pi, see the Balena section.
For highly available production cloud deployments with high throughput, we recommend using The Things Stack Cloud or AWS Launcher. All deployments of The Things Stack except Open Source and AWS Launcher support multi-tenancy, which allows you to create multiple private network servers within a single deployment, for example to resell to individual clients.
Continue following these instructions to run The Things Stack Enterprise or Open Source on your own hardware, using Docker.
In addition to the following written instructions, video instructions for installing The Things Stack are available on The Things Network youtube channel.
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Prerequisites
- A server with a recommended 4 virtual CPUs and 16GB RAM running Docker and Docker Compose*
- DNS records pointing to your server’s IP address (skip if using
localhost) - A license for The Things Stack (only for Enterprise)
*Benchmark for 100K devices with 12 confirmed uplinks per day. Your requirements will vary depending on your load and desired redundancy.
If purchasing an Enterprise license, consider setting up a multi-tenant environment from the beginning if you plan to add tenants later. Switching from a a single-tenant to multi-tenant environment requires database migration.
For multi-tenant deployments, DNS records for *.domain need to be created in addition to the plain domain record. For offline deployments, internal DNS pointing to your server’s IP address can be used, and The Things Industries can provide a license for that domain name.
This guide shows you how to get everything up and running on a server. If you are comfortable with configuring servers and working with command line, this is the perfect place to start, but first, follow the guides to install Docker, to install Docker Compose, and to configure permissions for Docker Engine.
Next, see instructions on how to configure, set up certificates and finally run The Things Stack!