recflare/DEPLOYING.md

Deploying

These are the instructions for deploying the RecFlare infrastructure to Cloudflare.

Why Cloudflare?

• Makes it easy to mirror RecNet Rec Room's backend is (was) a set of independent microservices, not one big monolith. Modeling each service as its own isolated Worker keeps RecFlare's structure close to the real thing — services scale, fail, and deploy independently — instead of collapsing everything into a single giant server.
• It's free/cheap to run a lot of service. Cloudflare Workers' free tier is keyed to usage, not to the number of Workers — so whether you deploy 1 service or all 36, the baseline cost is the same. You only start paying once usage crosses the free-tier limits. Additionally for development or maybe a private instance, the cost is near zero when not in use.
• Bundled Cloud CDN/Storage/SQL Cloudflare offers several cloud services we can rely on so the microservices can remain stateless (effectively read-only). They are also scalable by default so we don't need to worry about adding more disk space or upgrading services. If we start outgrowing the limits of these, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
  • D1 (a SQLite-compatible distributed database)
  • R2 (service like S3 for mass file hosting)
  • KV (service to distributed offer key/value stores)
  • Durable Objects (for a notifications hub)

Do I have to use Cloudflare?

Short answer, no. The services are plain Hono apps, so the request-handling code isn't tied to Cloudflare and can be deployed to other hosting providers — AWS, Vercel, Netlify, Fly.io, a plain Node/Bun server, and so on.

Long answer: the catch is everything around the code. RecFlare leans on Cloudflare for the deployment (Wrangler) and infrastructure layer — custom-domain routing per service, plus the storage bindings (D1, KV, R2, Durable Objects) the workers use. On another provider you'll need to provide equivalents (per-service routing, databases, object storage, a pub/sub or WebSocket layer) and wire up the deployment yourself.

So for example if you wanted to run on Vercel, you'd have to swap out KV for Redis, which are very similar services but would require small code changes.

Prerequisites

You must have all these requirements or RecFlare deployment will fail!

• node 24 (https://nodejs.org)
• pnpm (install with npm install -g pnpm)
• bun (https://bun.sh)
• jq/awk/sed (on Windows try winget jq etc.)
• A Cloudflare account with a zone (domain) you control, for deploying.

Cloudflare's free plan is good enough for testing (100k worker requests/day) but the Rec Room client is very chatty. Frequent testing may exhaust that quota. The $5/month Worker plan includes 10M requests/month.

See https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#workers

Getting Started

Install dependencies:

We use Just for convenience. This will install all dependencies across the microservices.

just install

You do not have to use just but you will have to run things manually with pnpm/bun.

Configure your custom domain:

Create a new .env file from the template:

cp .env.example .env

Edit .env and set RECFLARE_DOMAIN to your domain (or declare it with export RECFLARE_DOMAIN=rec.example.com)

(Optional) - per-app subdomain overrides come from RECFLARE_SUBDOMAINS (a JSON object, e.g. '{"playersettings":"settings"}'). This would be used if you wanted to merge two services together e.g. send datacollection calls to api.

Create the storage resources:

The workers bind Cloudflare storage primitives. Create them once against your Cloudflare account, then record the IDs in .env. The committed wrangler.jsonc files carry "local" placeholders; the real IDs are spliced in at deploy time, so nothing in version control needs editing. Authenticate wrangler first (wrangler login).

wrangler d1 create recflare
wrangler kv namespace create RECFLARE_MATCH_PRESENCE
wrangler kv namespace create RECFLARE_PLAYER_SETTINGS
wrangler secrets-store store create recflare --scopes workers

Take the IDs output from the commands and put them into .env. (or with CI: RECFLARE_KV='{"RECFLARE_MATCH_PRESENCE":"<id>","RECFLARE_PLAYER_SETTINGS":"<id>"}')

The secrets store holds the shared JWT_SECRET HS256 signing key — every worker binds it so tokens signed by auth verify everywhere. Record its id in .env as RECFLARE_SECRETS_STORE, then set the key value once (all workers share it):

wrangler secrets-store secret create <store-id> --name JWT_SECRET --scopes workers --remote

The same store also holds META_APP_SECRET, the app secret from your app's page in the Meta developer dashboard (developers.meta.com). Only the auth worker binds it, and only to authenticate itself to Meta when validating a headset login's nonce — unlike Steam's ticket, which verifies offline, a Meta login cannot be checked without it. Create it too:

wrangler secrets-store secret create <store-id> --name META_APP_SECRET --scopes workers --remote

⚠️ Both secrets must exist in the store or just deploy fails on the auth worker — a binding to a missing secret is a deploy error. If you have no Meta app, create META_APP_SECRET with any placeholder value: Meta sign-ins then fail with a 500 ("Meta platform verification is not configured") and nothing else is affected. Steam and password sign-ins are unaffected either way. Put the real value in later with wrangler secrets-store secret update — no redeploy needed, the worker reads the secret per request.

Then apply the schema. just migrate will set up the database and populate it with data. This runs non-interactively, so be careful!

just migrate                 # migrate every worker that owns migrations
just migrate -F rooms        # or scope to one worker

R2 and Durable Objects

You only have to create the buckets:

wrangler r2 bucket create recflare-cdn
wrangler r2 bucket create recflare-img

Durable Objects

Nothing manual to do here. The object is created manually.

Run the development microservices:

⚠️ Note: This runs, but the name-server document still advertises the deployed hosts, not your local instances — so service discovery won't resolve locally. You can still call each service directly; each Wrangler instance runs on its own port. Maybe we can get this working somehow. @todo

just dev

Deploy or upgrade all workers

This will deploy or upgrade all workers to respective endpoints (*.example.com)

It will additionally run any necessary DB migrations.

Deploying requires wrangler to be authenticated against your Cloudflare account (wrangler login, or CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN / CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID in the environment).

It requires the storage to be set up above, otherwise, deployments may fail.

You can always re-run it as often as you wish. DB migrations will only run once.

just install # Makes sure dependencies are up to date
just migrate # Runs DB migrations
just deploy # Deploy code

Optionally if you know there was only a change to a single service, you can use just [migrate|deploy] -F econ for example to only deploy the econ microservice.

Tuning your server

A few gameplay/policy values are knobs rather than hardcoded constants, and they live in the same .env you already created. .env.example carries each one commented out, set to its built-in default: copy the lines you want to change into your .env, uncomment them, edit the value, then re-deploy the worker that reads them.

.env variable	Read by	Default	What it does
RECFLARE_MAX_ACCOUNTS_PER_PLATFORM_ID	auth	3	Accounts one Steam-verified identity may create. 0 disables.
RECFLARE_MAX_ACCOUNTS_PER_IP	auth	3	Accounts one signup IP may create. 0 disables.
RECFLARE_STARTING_TOKENS	econ	10000	RecCenterTokens a new player is granted.
RECFLARE_ROOM_REDIRECTS	match	unset	Rooms to switch out on matchmake, e.g. 2=MyHub.

Then deploy just the worker that reads it:

just deploy -F auth

A line you leave out of .env keeps its default, so only copy over what you actually want to change — and deleting a line you'd set restores the default on the next deploy. The same .env feeds just dev, so a knob is configured once and behaves the same locally as it does deployed.

Adding a knob of your own takes no changes to the deploy tooling. Every RECFLARE_* in .env is handed to the workers as a variable under its unprefixed name — RECFLARE_STARTING_TOKENS arrives as STARTING_TOKENS — so a new one only needs declaring in that worker's src/context.ts and reading in its code. Every worker receives every knob and ignores the ones it doesn't read, which is also how two services can share a value. (The domain and the resource ids above are the exception: those configure the deploy itself and are never passed to a worker.)

Both account caps are enforced on signup only, never on login — an existing account always stays reachable no matter how many its owner has accumulated. The per-IP cap is the coarse one: households, NAT and shared campus/mobile networks put many legitimate players behind a single address, so raise it (or set it to 0) if real players report being locked out.

Don't set these as Worker variables in the Cloudflare dashboard. A deploy replaces a worker's variables wholesale, so a dashboard-set value is wiped by your next just deploy. .env is the durable place. Real secrets don't belong there either — they go in the Cloudflare Secrets Store, like the shared JWT_SECRET above.

Signing up on the website (Turnstile)

Players get an account by launching the game, which needs no setup. The website can create one too — that path has no platform identity behind it, so it runs behind a Turnstile bot check and is closed until you configure one. Two steps, both one-time:

1. Create the widget: Cloudflare dashboard → Turnstile → Add widget, mode Managed, hostnames your domain (add localhost if you want it in just dev against real keys). It gives you a site key and a secret key.

2. Put both in the same Secrets Store the shared JWT_SECRET lives in — they're the switch that opens signup, and store values survive deploys:

   wrangler secrets-store secret create <store-id> --name TURNSTILE_SITE_KEY \
     --scopes workers --remote
   wrangler secrets-store secret create <store-id> --name TURNSTILE_SECRET_KEY \
     --scopes workers --remote
   

Then just deploy -F www. The site key is public — the browser needs it to render the widget, and gets it from GET /api/config — but it lives next to its secret so signup is configured in one place. The secret key never leaves the worker: /api/signup verifies the token against Turnstile server-side before it calls auth.

Signup opens only when both resolve. With either missing, /api/config reports signup closed (the site shows sign-in only) and POST /api/signup refuses — a missed step costs you the signup form, never an unprotected one. That is also how you turn signup back off: wrangler secrets-store secret delete <store-id> --name TURNSTILE_SECRET_KEY --remote, then redeploy www (values are cached per isolate, so a warm worker keeps the old one until fresh isolates start). For local dev, seed the same two names into the local store from apps/www — Turnstile's documented always-passes test keypair (1x00000000000000000000AA / 1x0000000000000000000000000000000AA) works there without a widget:

cd apps/www
printf '1x00000000000000000000AA' |
  wrangler secrets-store secret create local --name TURNSTILE_SITE_KEY --scopes workers
printf '1x0000000000000000000000000000000AA' |
  wrangler secrets-store secret create local --name TURNSTILE_SECRET_KEY --scopes workers

Both auth account caps above still apply on top of the bot check, and the per-IP one is the only cap that can see a web signup.

www reaches auth through a service binding, not over auth.<DOMAIN>, so that the player's real IP survives the hop: a Worker subrequest to the public hostname re-enters the Cloudflare edge, which rewrites CF-Connecting-IP to Cloudflare's own address, and auth would then record one shared signupIp for every web account and cap the whole internet at three. Two consequences: deploy auth before www on a fresh account (the binding refuses to resolve otherwise), and web accounts created before this change carry that shared address as their permanent signupIp — harmless, but they are not counted against any real network.

Repository Structure

• apps/ - The service workers, one deployable Worker per subdirectory. Each has its own README.md, wrangler.jsonc, src/, and tests.
• packages/ - Shared libraries and configuration used across the workers.
  • @repo/hono-helpers - Hono framework utilities (logging, error handling).
  • @repo/tools - The runx CLI and the bin/ scripts each worker's package.json delegates to, so build/test/deploy stays consistent.
  • @repo/typescript-config, @repo/oxlint-config - Shared TS and lint config.
• turbo/generators/ - turbo gen templates for scaffolding new workers/packages.
• Justfile - Convenient aliases for common development tasks.

Available Commands

This repository uses a Justfile. Run just (or just --list) to see every command. Some key ones:

• just install - Install all dependencies.
• just dev - Start the dev server (context-aware: runs bun runx dev).
• just build - Build all workers.
• just test - Run tests (vitest).
• just check - Check code quality: deps, lint, types, format.
• just fix - Fix code issues: deps, lint, format, workers-types.
• just deploy - Deploy all workers to your domain.
• just new-worker (alias: just gen) - Scaffold a new service worker.
• just new-package - Scaffold a new shared package.
• just update deps - Update dependencies across the monorepo with syncpack.

For a single worker, scope with -F, e.g. just deploy -F playersettings.