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WAN

Information for users planning on hosting WAN (Wide Area Network) servers

caution

If you are exposing your Pocket Relay server to the internet you are expected to have an existing understanding of cybersecurity and server hosting. This guide does not show you how to set up a secure/hardened setup; rather, it just shows you what is required to make your server work with Pocket Relay. You are expected to configure your servers properly yourself.

If you expose your Pocket Relay server to the internet, anyone with the Connection URL will be able to connect to it (unless you specifically prevent them with things such as firewalls or IP whitelisting on your server).

If you would like to expose your server but only want authorized users to access it you can see the Client Certificate Auth section for how to use client certificates for cryptographic authentication.

Its also possible to temporarily expose the server over WAN using Ngrok as a reverse proxy. You can find out how to do this at Ngrok Guide

Joining issues​

note

There is new server connection tunneling which is a feature included in server version >= v0.6.0 and client version >= 0.4.0

Tunneling solves the issue mentioned below so using the official QoS servers will likely no longer be required for WAN servers in releases >= 0.6.0

For details about tunneling see https://github.com/PocketRelay/Server/issues/64

If you're hosting a WAN (Wide Area Network) server and some players experience issues joining each other in the game, particularly getting stuck in matchmaking indefinitely (while the server dashboard shows them as in the game), the problem may be related to the QoS (Quality of Service) server.

This issue is a limitation of the current server setup.

You can resolve this problem by instructing your server to use the "official" QoS server. Refer to the Official option under QoS. By default, this setting is "local" to avoid relying on official servers for general LAN usage. However, due to the current circumstances, it's necessary to switch to the "official" QoS servers to prevent joining issues for some WAN users.

QoS Configuration

Below is a snippet taken from the configuration section, your config should contain the below in order to fix the above mentioned

{
  "qos": {
    "type": "official"
  }
}

Reverse Proxy​

If you are using a reverse proxy in front of your server you should check out the Reverse Proxy guide