ewan's docs

moonstone is a personal AT Protocol PDS implementation, optimised for NixOS/Caddy deployments without Bluesky infrastructure defaults.

Warning: I do not recommend you deploy this. It is experimental and completely done for fun. I do not intend to maintain it after it is in a working state.

Features

No Bluesky infra defaults — no api.bsky.app, mod.bsky.app etc. wired in
did:plc supported — via configurable PDS_PLC_URL (defaults to plc.directory)
Rust identity layer (@ewanc26/moonstone-native) — handle/DID syntax validation and async identity resolution backed by rsky-syntax and rsky-identity via neon N-API bindings
Typed, validated config — zod schema, personal-PDS defaults, fast-fail on missing secrets
Self-contained — all dependencies declared within this repo (git deps for rsky crates)
NixOS module at nix/module.nix — SOPS secrets, systemd service, Caddy virtualHost

Packages

Package	Description
`@ewanc26/moonstone-config`	Env parsing + zod validation
`@ewanc26/moonstone-native`	Rust native addon (neon) — syntax validation + DID/handle resolution
`@ewanc26/moonstone-server`	PDS server entry point

Quick start

# 1. Build the Rust native addon
pnpm run build:native

# 2. Build TypeScript
pnpm run build:ts

# 3. Set env vars (see .env.example)
cp .env.example .env && $EDITOR .env

# 4. Run
node packages/server/dist/index.js

Required env vars (injected via SOPS in production):

PDS_HOSTNAME=pds.example.com
PDS_JWT_SECRET=<openssl rand --hex 16>
PDS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=<openssl rand --hex 16>
PDS_PLC_ROTATION_KEY_K256_PRIVATE_KEY_HEX=<see .env.example>

Federation

moonstone defaults to the relay list from nix-config options.nix — a broad set of independent ATProto relays plus bsky.network. To use a different set, override PDS_CRAWLERS:

PDS_CRAWLERS=https://relay.cerulea.blue,https://relay.feeds.blue

To disable all relay announcements:

PDS_CRAWLERS=

did:plc resolution uses plc.directory by default — an ATProto protocol dependency, not a Bluesky product. Override with PDS_PLC_URL to point at a self-hosted PLC directory.

NixOS

See nix/module.nix. Add to nix-config:

inputs.moonstone.url = "github:ewanc26/moonstone";
# pass as specialArgs and import the module
imports = [ inputs.moonstone.nixosModules.moonstone ];

License

AGPL-3.0-only