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.

Tutorial Scope: Install Reacher on a single server

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.

However, for the sake of this tutorial, we will install Reacher on a single dedicated server. This allows minimal setup to get Reacher working, and ensures that the chosen cloud provider allows outgoing port 25 requests.

If you're interested in ideas for a production deployment setup, skip to Scaling for Production.

Step-by-Step Tutorial

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

2. Run Reacher's latest (v0.7) Docker image:

docker run -p 8080:8080 reacherhq/backend:latest # v0.7

You should see the following output:

2024-09-19T12:58:32.918254Z  INFO reacher: Running Reacher version="0.10.0"
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 (v0.7).

1. 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

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.

1. 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 [e-mail].