Anyone who has tried to run a STEEM server knows it's not the nicest thing to set up.
I've been working on getting a Docker set up that would allow me to deploy new servers with very little effort, except many people don't have docker installed, nor do they know how to use it.
Introducing Steem-in-a-box
Steem-in-a-box is a small shell script that handles all of the docker magic behind the scenes, and comes with a ready-to-go seed config, which can be modified as needed, e.g. change it to be a witness, or an RPC server, whatever you want.
How easy is it?
Grab a 4 or 8GB RAM server from DigitalOcean ($10 free for signing up),
I've fully tested this on a brand new Ubuntu 16.04 box on DigitalOcean, so anyone can get a seed/witness up in no time.
Spin up a new Ubuntu 16.04 server (other distributions may or may not work), copy and paste this command, then sit back and relax:
apt update && apt install curl git && \
curl https://get.docker.com | sh && \
git clone https://github.com/Someguy123/steem-docker.git && \
cd steem-docker && \
./run.sh build && ./run.sh start
Be aware that STEEM is very resource hungry, you'll need a bare minimum of 4GB of ram, but I strongly recommend at least 8GB.
After you paste this command (as root), you can sit back and relax. When the commands finish, you'll have a seed server up and running, without needing to configure a thing! How great is that?
Be aware that the build can take a while depending on how fast your system is. Once it's done, you'll have a seed up and running listening on port 2001, automatically exposed. Don't want a seed? Just look in the data/witness_node_data_dirfolder, and edit config.ini as needed.
Changed the config? No problem. No need to rebuild, just ./run.sh restart and you'll be good to go.
Keeping track of the STEEM server as simple as ./run.sh status to see if it's running or not, and of course ./run.sh logs to see what it's doing right now.
As usual, the source code is up on Github, and is released under the GNU AGPL open source licence: https://github.com/Someguy123/steem-docker