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Set Up Your Own Server

This guide takes you from nothing to a project running on your own hardware: purchase a Bring Your Own Server subscription, connect your server, and create a project that deploys to it.

Prerequisites

  • A Skysize account with administrator access to a billing account.
  • A Linux server that meets the server requirements (Ubuntu 22.04+ or Debian 12+, public IPv4 address, outbound internet access).
  • SSH access to that server with root privileges.

Step 1: Purchase a Bring Your Own Server subscription​

BYOS capacity is unlocked by a Bring Your Own Server subscription on your billing account. Each BYOS project is linked to one subscription.

  1. Open the Agents page in the Skysize dashboard.
  2. Choose the billing account you want the subscription on.
  3. Click Purchase Bring Your Own Server and complete the checkout: pick a billing cycle (monthly, yearly, or every 3 years), confirm your billing details, and pay.

See pricing for current plans. Activation is confirmed within about a minute of payment.

note

If you signed up choosing the "Bring your own server" path, the onboarding flow walks you through this same subscription, server connection, and project creation sequence automatically.

Step 2: Prepare your server​

A fresh, empty server is the best starting point; the installer sets up Docker, PostgreSQL, a web server, and the Skysize agent for you.

Make sure that:

  • The OS is Ubuntu 22.04+ or Debian 12+ (x86_64 or ARM64).
  • You can SSH in and run commands as root (directly or via sudo).
  • The server can reach the internet outbound.
  • Ports 80 and 443 are open to the internet if you plan to serve your Odoo sites with your own domains and SSL (recommended).

Step 3: Register the server in the dashboard​

  1. On the Agents page, find Register a new agent.
  2. Enter a name for the server (lowercase letters, digits, and dashes only, for example prod-odoo-1) and choose the billing account holding your Bring Your Own Server subscription.
  3. Click Register agent.

The new entry briefly shows Pending confirmation while the subscription purchase is verified; this usually takes less than a minute. Once confirmed, the dashboard shows a connection panel with three things:

  • The install command to run on your server.
  • Your Agent ID.
  • A one-time join token.
caution

The join token is shown only once. Copy it before leaving the page. If you lose it, open the server's detail page and use Regenerate join token to issue a new one.

Step 4: Install the Skysize agent on your server​

SSH into your server and run the install command from the dashboard:

curl -sSL https://releases.skysize.io/agent/install.sh | sudo bash

The installer asks a few questions. Accept the defaults unless you have a specific reason not to, and paste your Agent ID and join token when prompted. It then installs everything the agent needs (Docker, PostgreSQL, a web server, and the agent itself) and starts the agent.

On first connection, the agent uses the join token to enroll: it generates its own key on your server and obtains a signed certificate from the platform. The certificate renews automatically; the join token is consumed and cannot be reused.

tip

If a previous agent installation existed on the same machine, the installer detects the old credentials and offers to remove them so the server can enroll fresh.

Step 5: Verify the server is online​

Back in the dashboard, the Agents page polls for the connection. Within a minute of the installer finishing, the server's status should change to Online.

On the server's detail page you can also see:

  • Last seen, updated by the agent's regular heartbeat.
  • CPU, memory, and disk metrics, collected every 30 seconds.
  • The job queue: work the server is running or waiting to run.

If the status stays Offline, check that the install command completed without errors and that the server has outbound internet access, then regenerate the join token and run the installer again.

Step 6: Create a project on your server​

  1. Start creating a project as usual (repository, Odoo version, and so on).
  2. Under Deployment target, choose My own server instead of Managed server.
  3. The project is linked to your Bring Your Own Server subscription automatically. Each subscription backs one project; if all of your subscriptions are already linked to projects, purchase another one from the Agents page.
  4. If you have connected more than one server, pick the Production server: your production database will run on this server, while other branches balance across all your servers. With a single server, everything runs there automatically.
  5. For an Enterprise project, you may be asked for a GitHub token for Odoo Enterprise if the target server does not have one configured yet. See Odoo Enterprise on your own server.
  6. Create the project. The first build is dispatched to your server and appears in the dashboard like any other deployment.

From here, the workflow is identical to managed hosting: push to your repository, watch the build, and manage branches from the dashboard.

Next steps​