Self-Hosting

Skol Arena ships as a single Docker image containing the API, the built frontend, and automatic database migrations. All you need is a PostgreSQL database.

Quick start

docker run -d \
  --name skol-arena \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -e DATABASE_URL="postgres://user:password@your-db-host:5432/skol_arena" \
  -e BETTER_AUTH_SECRET="$(openssl rand -base64 32)" \
  quent1l/skol-arena:latest

On first boot the app runs its database migrations automatically, then creates an initial super-admin account if the database is empty. Watch the container logs for the generated password: it is regenerated and logged again on every restart until that account logs in for the first time — see Deployment for details.

Only two variables are truly required to get a working instance: DATABASE_URL and BETTER_AUTH_SECRET. Everything else has a usable default — the image already points FRONTEND_BUILD_PATH and MIGRATIONS_FOLDER at the bundled frontend build and migrations, so a single container serves both the API and the web app.

Where to go next

• Environment Variables — every variable the app reads, what it configures, and whether it’s required.
• Deployment — the full Docker Compose setup (app + Postgres), how migrations and the first admin account work, and notes on architecture support.

Once the instance is up, these pages cover how it behaves:

• Matches — the player-driven match workflow, the four validation modes and the trust score, and the team formats a match can take.
• Disciplines & Scoring — disciplines, outcome types and their weights, rules pages, and the contextual rules engine.
• MMR Rating — how ranked ratings are computed: the Elo formula, per-discipline sharing between teammates, season seeding and recalculation.
• Accounts & Access — authentication methods, invitation codes, and scoping tournaments to an organization.

Prerequisites

• A PostgreSQL database (any recent version) reachable from the container.
• Docker (or a Docker-compatible runtime) able to pull from Docker Hub .

Resource requirements

Skol Arena is light: the API idles at roughly 100 MB of resident memory and near-zero CPU, and the image itself is about 185 MB. The cheapest tier at any VPS provider, or a spare x86 box, comfortably runs a club-sized instance. Published images are linux/amd64 only — on ARM, build from the Dockerfile first (see Deployment).

Bun grows its heap whenever the host has memory to spare, so on a tight box cap the container (mem_limit: 512m, or --memory 512m) — it collects more eagerly instead of drifting upward, rather than needing the extra RAM. Disk is dominated by the Postgres volume: matches and standings are small text rows, so a season adds very little.

CPU only matters in bursts — bracket generation and a ranked season recalculation are the heaviest operations, and both are short. Everything else is request-scoped.