Many approaches are possible to do this. This wiki page documents one possible approach.

At the end of the day you want to run one of these servers:

• omnisette-server
• anisette-v3-server

See also:

• macless-haystack README on hosting this server
• SideStore's docs on hosting a custom Anisette Server
• this project's README and this project

This is quite simple. Simply enter your custom server's base URL through any of the methods described in this page.

This is the approach I used in my testing. This is a free solution insofar as Oracle Cloud gives out permanent free VPS instances. I don't believe any other cloud providers are currently this generous.

However, note that a credit card is required for this solution, as you have to authenticate using a credit card during the account registration process there.

Steps:

1. Created a (free) UBUNTU VPS instance @ Oracle and gave it a public IPv4 IP

   • VPS specs in my test:
     • OS: Ubuntu 24.04 Minimal
     • Memory (GB): 1
     • vCPUs: 1/2 (Oracle has a weird definition for this, technically I got 1 OCPU but they claim this is teh same as 2 vCPUs. More here)
     • Disk: df -h says 45GB (this is probably a HDD, in the UI it is "Block Storage only". This is whatever the default free option is)

2. Pointed a subdomain at it (Setup a new DNS A record to the VPS).

   • I personally use Cloudflare's Nameservers/DNS manager because I set this up ages ago. I think you can still use this for free these days.

3. Installed docker on the VPS (follow this official guide up until the Hello World test)

4. Follow the "Server Setup" step from the macless-haystack project

   1. Setup a new docker network:

      sudo docker network create mh-network

   2. Setup the server, mapping the port to your custom port (I chose to expose the server on port 3000 during my testing, feel free to set a different PORT=<yourport> value):

      PORT=3000
      sudo docker run -d --restart always \
          --name anisette \
          -p $PORT:6969 \
          --volume anisette-v3_data:/home/Alcoholic/.config/anisette-v3 \
          --network mh-network \
          dadoum/anisette-v3-server

      If you need HTTPS/SSL/TLS, I would suggest making use of Nginx + Certbot. I personally used their Nginx + Linux (snap) setup guide.