It's well known that Flipstarter is a game changer in the BCH community, Thanks to @JonathanSilverblood and @emergent_reasons .

Despite that it's fairly easy to create a Flipstarter campaign using the DigitalOcean build created by @merc1er , issue is that DigitalOcean doesn't accept Crypto payment. Here I put in details the way to install it on any VPS provider.

UPDATE: I've added instructions to install Bitcoin Verde version and updated nvm and node version as of 08/2023.

Prerequisites

• VPS with minimum 512 MB of ram

• Ubuntu 20.04

General VPS Setup

After you ssh to your hosting as root for the first time, update the system:

apt update

then upgrade it:

apt upgrade

If you get asked any question just use the default value.

Create a normal user, I chose flipstarter here, you can use what ever you like:

adduser flipstarter

Add user to the super user group so it can run as privileged user when needed:

usermod -aG sudo flipstarter

Check the firewall app list:

ufw app list

Allow connections to SSH:

ufw allow OpenSSH

Enable the firewall:

ufw enable

If you used ssh key instead of password to login:

rsync --archive --chown=flipstarter:flipstarter ~/.ssh /home/flipstarter

for more details check this tutorial:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu-20-04

Setting up Flipstarter

Setting up Node.js tools

Login to system as the new user flipstarter , it's not recommended to use root.

Choosing a Flipstarter version

There are two version of Flipstarter, one from the official team and one from Verde Team which has advanced feature to allow donation from any wallet

Get the Flipstarter software from the code repository:

git clone  https://gitlab.com/flipstarter/backend

or use Verde's https://github.com/SoftwareVerde/flipstarter instead.

Setup NVM to get node and dependencies

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.5/install.sh | bash

After you run it, it gives you the choice of closing and reopening Terminal or running the following commands:

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion

After that we can install Node:

nvm install v14.21.3

Here I chose version v14.21.3 which seems the latest in time of writing but you can get list of all v14 versions and other using: nvm list-remote

Then we cd into backend or flipstarter if you used Verde's version:

cd backend/

We run:

npm ci

Then run Flipstarter:

npm start

You can close it using Ctrl+C for now.

Testing Flipstarter

Above command should run Flipstarter software on port 3000 but it's blocked by the firewall. So you can either proceed without testing or open port 3000 in the firewall.

sudo ufw allow 3000

Then npm start again.

Later to close port after testing we get numbered list of firewall rules:

sudo ufw status numbered

It would show something like this:

Status: active

     To                         Action      From
     --                         ------      ----
[ 1] OpenSSH                    ALLOW IN    Anywhere                  
[ 2] Nginx Full                 ALLOW IN    Anywhere                  
[ 3] 3000                       ALLOW IN    Anywhere                  
[ 4] OpenSSH (v6)               ALLOW IN    Anywhere (v6)             
[ 5] Nginx Full (v6)            ALLOW IN    Anywhere (v6)             
[ 6] 3000 (v6)                  ALLOW IN    Anywhere (v6)  

Then we delete rule number 3 as it's here the one for port 3000:

sudo ufw delete 3

confirm that it's the 3000 port rule being removed.

Installing the Process Manager PM2

Maybe you can have Flipstarter running using npm start by using it in screen session but the proper way to do it for production is to use a process manager that will manage control, reset and autostart the process.

Let us install the process manager PM2, we do:

npm install pm2 -g

We start, daemonize and monitor the app by:

pm2 start server.js --node-args "--use_strict"

We can check status:

pm2 ls

Which shows something similar to:

┌─────┬───────────┬─────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬──────────┬────────┬──────┬───────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┐
│ id  │ name      │ namespace   │ version │ mode    │ pid      │ uptime │ ↺    │ status    │ cpu      │ mem      │ user     │ watching │
├─────┼───────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼──────────┼────────┼──────┼───────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┤
│ 0   │ server    │ default     │ 0.0.1   │ fork    │ 52900    │ 0s     │ 0    │ online    │ 0%       │ 29.9mb   │ fli… │ disabled │
└─────┴───────────┴─────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴──────────┴────────┴──────┴───────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┘

To generate a startup script run:

pm2 startup

Which at the end will suggests running:

sudo env PATH=$PATH:/home/flipstarter/.nvm/versions/node/v14.21.3/bin /home/flipstarter/.nvm/versions/node/v14.10.0/lib/node_modules/pm2/bin/pm2 startup systemd -u flipstarter --hp /home/flipstarter

So run that then run the following command so process will be persistent between reboots:

pm2 save

You can read more about how PM2 works in:

• PM2 Process Management Quick Start

• Persistent applications: Startup Script Generator

Installing Nginx to Handle http and https

Nginx will handle http and https requests and forward it to the app. This is called a reverse proxy.

Install nginx:

sudo apt install nginx

Open port for Nginx in the firewall:

ufw allow 'Nginx Full'

Remove the default site:

sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Create the reverse proxy configurations:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/reverse-proxy

Put this in the file replacing test.example.com with your own domain:

server {
        server_name test.example.com;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/reverse-access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/reverse-error.log;

        location / {
                        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
                        proxy_http_version 1.1;
                        proxy_buffering off;
                        proxy_cache off;
                        proxy_set_header Connection '';
                        chunked_transfer_encoding off;
  }
    listen 80;

}

Link the newly created site to the enabled sites:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/reverse-proxy /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Restart Nginx service:

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

Installing Certbot

We uses snap to install Certbot as it's the recommended method for Ubuntu:

sudo snap install --classic certbot

Prepare the Certbot command:

sudo ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot

Setup Cert on Nginx:

sudo certbot --nginx

Certbot should ask you for an email and few simple questions to issue the certificate and modify your Nginx site settings.

More details about Certbot here

Enjoy!

Now head to your domain. You should find Flipstarter working. Congratulation!

Few notes

If you face some of the following issues:

Empty Flipstarter

If you find the Flipstarter page empty without details it could be because you didn't run npm start you can run npx webpack to fix it

Why having too many proxy options in Nginx settings?

The proxy options in Nginx are necessary to avoid having delay in showing pledges or not showing at all.

                        proxy_http_version 1.1;
                        proxy_buffering off;
                        proxy_cache off;
                        proxy_set_header Connection '';
                        chunked_transfer_encoding off;

Thanks to the For The Win Flipstarter, I had the time to create this tutorial. :)