Deploy Firezone
Firezone can be deployed on most Docker-supported platforms in a couple of minutes. Read more below to get started.
Step 1: Prepare to deploy
Regardless of which deployment method you choose, you'll need to follow the preparation steps below before deploying Firezone to production.
Create a DNS record
Firezone requires a fully-qualified domain name (e.g. firezone.company.com
)
for production use. You'll need to create the appropriate DNS record at your
registrar to achieve this. Typically this is either an A, CNAME, or AAAA record
depending on your requirements.
Set up SSL
You'll need a valid SSL certificate to use Firezone in a production capacity. Firezone supports ACME for automatic provisioning of SSL certificates for both Docker-based and Omnibus-based installations. This is recommended in most cases.
Setting up ACME for Docker-based deployments
For Docker-based deployments, the simplest way to provision an SSL certificate is to use our Caddy service example in docker-compose.yml. Caddy uses ACME to automatically provision SSL certificates as long as it's available on port 80/tcp and the DNS record for the server is valid.
See the Docker deployment guide for more info.
For Omnibus-based deployments, ACME is disabled by default to maintain compatibility with existing installations.
To enable ACME, ensure the following conditions are met:
-
80/tcp
is allow inbound -
The bundled Firezone
nginx
service is enabled and functioning -
You have a valid DNS record assigned to this instance's public IP
-
The following 3 settings are configured in the configuration file:
default['firezone']['external_url']
: The FQDN for the server.default['firezone']['ssl']['email_address']
: The email that will be used for the issued certificates.default['firezone']['ssl']['acme']['enabled']
: Set this to true to enable it.
Open required firewall ports
By default, Firezone requires ports 443/tcp
and 51820/udp
to be accessible
for HTTPS and WireGuard traffic respectively. These ports can change based on
what you've configured in the configuration file. See the
configuration file reference for details.
Resource requirements
We recommend starting with 1 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM and scaling up as the number of users and devices grows.
For Omnibus-based deployments on servers with less than 1GB of memory, we recommend turning on swap to prevent the Linux kernel from killing Firezone processes unexpectedly. When this happens, it's often difficult to debug and results in strange, unpredictable failure modes.
For the VPN tunnels themselves, Firezone uses in-kernel WireGuard, so its performance should be very good. 1 vCPU should be more than enough to saturate a 1 Gbps link.
Step 2: Deploy
You have two options for deploying Firezone:
Docker is the easiest way to install, manage, and upgrade Firezone and is the preferred method of deployment.
Chef Infra Client, the configuration system Chef Omnibus relies on, has been scheduled for End-of-Life in 2024. As such, support for Omnibus-based deployments will be removed starting with Firezone 0.8. To transition to Docker from Omnibus today, follow our migration guide.