Blog Guide to running a star on Urbit

Updated January 22, 2023

I have been asked several times about what is necessary to run a star on Urbit.

For those of you who don't know, a star is basically an ISP on the Urbit network that services 65000 planets (addresses). Eventually, stars will provide routing and maintenance and utilities to the planets under them. It is considered good etiquette in Urbit to make sure your star is up and running if you are selling or giving away planets. Otherwise, your planets won't have a great experience getting started and will have to do some troubleshooting to figure out why they are not updating.

However, today, routing is handled by galaxies, and stars simply relay updates.

So the requirements for running a star are not very much. You can run a star on a $10 VPS from Linode or Digital Ocean.

Star Maintenance

There's just not much to do as far as maintenance. Years ago, things were not very stable and I had to restart my star on a regular basis. As of 2020, my stars are very stable. I use Uptime Robot to track uptime, and I'm over 99.9%.

I don't foresee needing to move to a beefier host until I have thousands of planets running under my star.

There did seem to be a bit of a bug that prevented my stars from passing on updates that I had to work out with support. All in, I probably spent 30 hours maintaining my stars in 2022.

The only other thing I can think of is that the storage on my VPS fills up and I have to restart my star from scratch. This is a known issue, and has been vastly improved over the last year. Some fixes are coming in early 2023 that will help with log size.

Routine Maintenance

You should run pack a couple times a month. There's no such thing as too often.

*pier*/.run pack

Also meld a couple times a month.

*pier*/.run meld

Keep an eye out for binary updates and make sure those go through.

Also keep an eye out for OTA updates and make sure you suspend apps and apply the update if necessary with bump

|bump

then 

|ota *your sponsor galaxy*

Typing +vats at the dojo prompt will give you important software version hashes that may help for troubleshooting.

You should also be tracking your uptime to make sure you're notified when things go down.  I use Uptime Robot, and I point it to the login page on my star.

That's really it.  We've come a long way in a few years.