Private Captcha self-hosting

Legal

Private Captcha is free for non-commercial use (community edition). Commercial use (enterprise edition) is a subject to EULA and requires obtaining a license.

Quick start

NOTE: Please visit the official quickstart docs for up-to-date instructions.

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/PrivateCaptcha/self-hosting.git private-captcha
cd private-captcha

2. Create .env file

cp .env.example .env

Some notes on environment variables:

• PC_USER_FINGERPRINT_KEY you can generate using openssl rand -hex 64
• PC_ADMIN_EMAIL will be used to create actual admin account (see note for local use below)
• PC_RATE_LIMIT_HEADER should be the header containing actual client IP (comes from your CDN or reverse proxy)

You can find full documentation about environment variables here.

Tips for local use

To run Private Captcha only locally, use privatecaptcha.local:8080 instead of yourdomain.com. To make it work, you need to add a few lines to /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1       portal.privatecaptcha.local
127.0.0.1       api.privatecaptcha.local
127.0.0.1       cdn.privatecaptcha.local

NOTE: email with .local domain is not a valid RFC-5322 address, so for 2FA code (required for login) you will need to find "two factor code" from docker logs manually

3. (optional) Expose port

If you want to use use Docker networking directly (which is not recommended) instead of reverse proxy like Nginx or Caddy, you can create a compose.override.yml file like this:

services:
  privatecaptcha:
    ports:
      - 8080:8080

4. Done! - navigate to the Portal

Now you can open $PC_PORTAL_BASE_URL (e.g. portal.yourdomain.com) in browser and log in.

Advanced configuration

Please refer to the official documentation which contains descriptions of all configuration options.

Enterprise edition

There are a few changes you will need to make using a compose.override.yml file, namely replace privatecaptcha image to privatecaptcha-ee and set an additional environment variable EE_LICENSE_KEY (which you should do in the .env file).

services:
  privatecaptcha:
    image: ghcr.io/privatecaptcha/privatecaptcha-ee:latest
    environment:
      - EE_LICENSE_KEY=${EE_LICENSE_KEY}
  migration:
    image: ghcr.io/privatecaptcha/privatecaptcha-ee:latest