Bolt Card Hub - Phoenix Edition

A lightweight, self-hosted service for hosting NFC Bolt Cards on the Lightning Network, powered by phoenixd.

Features

• host bolt cards
• web admin
• low resource use

Technologies

• Phoenix Server
• SQLite database
• docker deployment

Install

• provision an m.1s VPS on lunanode using the Debian 12 64-bit template ($3.50 per month, LunaNode accept bitcoin and are lightning enabled for payments)
• log in to the machine using SSH (Linux) or Putty (Windows)
• install docker
• enable managing docker as a non root user
• add swap space (the Go build needs more memory than the 1GB VPS provides)

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

• set up a DNS A record pointing hub.yourdomain.com to the VPS IP address

git clone https://github.com/boltcard/hub
cd hub
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env to set HOST_DOMAIN=hub.yourdomain.com

• build and start the services

docker compose build
docker compose up -d

• wait for a few minutes for the TLS certificate to be installed
• access the admin web interface at https://hub.yourdomain.com/admin/ to set a password and login

Operations

View the Logs

docker compose logs

Access the Database

docker compose exec card sqlite3 /card_data/cards.db

Get a Shell on a Container

docker exec -it phoenix bash
./phoenix-cli

docker exec -it card bash
./app

Update

git pull
docker compose down
docker compose build
docker compose up -d
docker system prune