Platforms

Hetzner

Run Rivet nodes on Hetzner Cloud servers.

Your process runs as a node: it opens a connection out to the control plane on startup. The server needs no public port and no Load Balancer, only outbound network access.

Requirements

A namespace and a node pool created with PUT /pools/{pool} (see Nodes & Node Pools). In local development, RivetKit creates the default pool for you.

The hcloud CLI, configured for your project, and an SSH key uploaded to the project
A running control plane

Steps

Create the server

Create a Firewall that only allows SSH from the internet, then a server behind it. Install Node.js 22 or newer on the server; Ubuntu’s own package is older, so use NodeSource.

hcloud firewall create --name rivet-node
hcloud firewall add-rule rivet-node --direction in --protocol tcp --port 22 --source-ips 0.0.0.0/0 --source-ips ::/0
hcloud server create --name rivet-node-1 --type cpx32 --image ubuntu-24.04 --location fsn1 \
  --ssh-key my-key --firewall rivet-node
ssh root@$(hcloud server ip rivet-node-1) 'curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | bash - && apt-get install -y nodejs'

If your control plane runs on Hetzner too, put the server in the same location.

Upload your build

Build locally, then copy the output somewhere readable by the service user:

scp -r ./dist root@<server-ip>:/opt/rivet-node

Create the systemd unit

TimeoutStopSec is the important line. Each Rivet Actor gets up to 15 seconds to save its state, so allow a minute.

[Unit]
Description=Rivet Node
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/opt/rivet-node
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node server.js
Restart=on-failure
TimeoutStopSec=60
Environment=RIVET_ENDPOINT=<your-rivet-endpoint>

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The endpoint value is described in Deploy Nodes. For secrets, prefer EnvironmentFile= pointing at a root-owned file over inline Environment= lines.

Start the service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now rivet-node.service

Verify

systemctl is-active rivet-node.service

Expect active. Call one of your Rivet Actors to confirm it responds.

Servers do not scale on their own. Nodes are interchangeable, so capacity is added by creating more servers with the same unit, each with the same unit and RIVET_ENDPOINT. They all join the same pool and start serving Rivet Actors. To autoscale instead, move the node to a platform that has one, such as Kubernetes.

Operating

Restart after deploying a new build or changing environment variables:

sudo systemctl restart rivet-node.service

Follow logs while debugging:

sudo journalctl -u rivet-node.service -f