Install Reacher in 20min

Reacher is built with self-hosting as a primary feature, giving you full control over how the service operates on your infrastructure. It can be deployed on a single server in under 20 minutes. This tutorial shows you how.

You can run this tutorial without a Commercial License, as a Free Trial. Read more about the Free Trial in Licensing.

Choosing the right infrastructure

The first choice to make is the cloud provider to run Reacher. Reacher is stateless by design, meaning you can deploy multiple containers, each running a separate instance of Reacher, to perform email verifications in parallel. This architecture enables easy horizontal scaling.

If you enable Bulk Verification, all Reacher instances will need to connect to the same Postgres database. They can still run independently, ensuring scalability and parallel processing.

However, for larger volume, it's important to manage the reputation of the IP addresses used for verifications, as poor IP will greatly decrease the quality of the results. Read more about IP Health Maintenance.

To get started, using dedicated servers with fixed IPs is recommended, as this allows you to maintain control over the IPs' reputation. Alternatively, you can also outsource the IP health maintenance to a 3rd party, by using Proxies.

The tutorial below assumes a single dedicated server. Make sure that your cloud provider allows outgoing requests on port 25.

Step-by-Step Tutorial

1. Install Docker on your server. You can follow Docker's guide for your OS.

2. Run Reacher's Docker image:

docker run -p 8080:8080 reacherhq/backend:latest

You should see the following output:

2024-09-19T12:58:32.918254Z  INFO reacher: Running Reacher version="0.7.0"
Starting ChromeDriver 124.0.6367.78 (a087f2dd364ddd58b9c016ef1bf563d2bc138711-refs/branch-heads/6367@{#954}) on port 9515
Only local connections are allowed.
Please see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/security-considerations for suggestions on keeping ChromeDriver safe.
ChromeDriver was started successfully.
2024-09-19T12:58:32.976589Z  INFO reacher: Server is listening host=0.0.0.0 port=80

Advanced users can set additional Docker Environment Variables.

3. Verify an email locally, from the shell of your server.

curl -X POST \
	-H'Content-Type: application/json' \
	-d'{"to_email":"[e-mail]"}' \
	http://localhost:8080/v0/check_email

If this step hangs for a long time, or returns a JSON result with is_reachable="unknown", it generally means that port 25 is restricted. See Debugging Reacheron how to fix this.

4. Make sure that you can verify an email remotely by running the following command from your local machine.

curl -X POST \
	-H'Content-Type: application/json' \
	-d'{"to_email":"[e-mail]"}' \
	http://<IP_OF_YOUR_SERVER>:8080/v0/check_email

5. If you see a JSON output with an is_reachable field, then you're set, congratulations! 🎉

Troubleshooting

If you have any issue in one of the steps above, you can try Debugging Reacheryourself, or send me an email amaury.