fips/docs/getting-started.md

Getting Started with FIPS

FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) is a self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities. Your machine becomes a node in the mesh with a self-generated cryptographic identity, and existing networking software — SSH, web servers, file transfer, anything IPv6-native — runs over the mesh unchanged.

There are two common ways to deploy FIPS, and the rest of this guide and the linked docs branch accordingly:

• As an overlay on top of existing IP networks (Ethernet, WiFi, the public internet, Tor), FIPS lets your node reach any other peer regardless of NAT, ISP, or physical location.
• From the ground up over non-IP transports — raw Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth — FIPS provides a complete permissionless network without any pre-existing IP infrastructure, ISP, or DNS.

The two paths share a lot of common ground — install, identity, configuration. They diverge mainly in transport setup and the deployment topology you choose.

There is no central server. Any node can run; any pair of running nodes can mesh.

What you'll need

• A Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, or Windows host. Linux is the most exercised platform; macOS, FreeBSD, and Windows installers are available. The FreeBSD package is built for x86_64 only.
• The pre-built installer for your platform (see the project README's Quick start section for download links), or a source checkout if you want to build the installer yourself.
• For the source-build path only: a working Rust toolchain (the version pinned in rust-toolchain.toml is auto-installed by rustup), and the platform-specific build dependencies listed in packaging/README.md.

Install

FIPS is installed by running a binary installer for your platform. The installer drops the daemon and CLI tools into system locations, installs systemd / launchd / rc.d / Windows-service unit files, places a default fips.yaml, and creates the fips system group. There is no cargo install path: the daemon needs more than just binaries copied into place.

You can either build the installer yourself from source, or download a pre-built one from the release distribution. Both paths produce the same installer artifacts and the same post-install state.

From the release distribution

The most direct path. The release distribution carries a per-platform installer:

• Debian/Ubuntu: .deb package
• Arch Linux: fips AUR package
• OpenWrt: .ipk and .apk packages
• macOS: .pkg installer
• FreeBSD: native .pkg (x86_64 only)
• Windows: .zip with service-install scripts
• Generic systemd Linux: .tar.gz with an install.sh script

The .deb and the systemd tarball support every version of a glibc distribution that its vendor still supports for free: currently Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13 and Ubuntu 26.04. Those binaries are built in a container pinned to the oldest of them, so they run on all five, and the glibc floor that follows is declared in packaging/build-floor.env and checked by testing/check-glibc-floor.sh on what the release workflow produces. Arch and NixOS build from source on your own machine, and OpenWrt is a musl target rather than glibc, so none of them depends on that floor.

See the project README's Quick start section for download links and per-platform invocations.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD gets a native package built from packaging/freebsd/. It ships fips, fipsctl, fipstop, the fips and fips_dns rc.d services, and .fips DNS integration. fips-gateway is not included: its NAT backend is nftables, which is Linux-only. The Ethernet and BLE transports are unavailable on FreeBSD; UDP, TCP, Tor, and Nym are.

On pfSense (CE or Plus) use packaging/pfsense/ rather than this package: pfSense diverges from stock FreeBSD in how it boots packages, generates the DNS resolver config, and applies upgrades, and the pfSense package handles each. See packaging/pfsense/README.md.

One architecture. The published artifact is fips-<version>-freebsd-amd64.pkg. There is no aarch64 FreeBSD build, so on any other architecture use the from-source path below.

pkg add ./fips-<version>-freebsd-amd64.pkg
cp /usr/local/etc/fips/fips.yaml.sample /usr/local/etc/fips/fips.yaml
sysrc fips_enable=YES fips_dns_enable=YES
service fips start
service fips_dns start
fipsctl show status

FreeBSD differs from the Linux layout in three places worth knowing before you go looking for files:

• Config lives at /usr/local/etc/fips/fips.yaml, not /etc/fips/. It installs with sample semantics and mode 0600, so an edited file survives pkg upgrade and pkg delete, and a nsec: in it is not world-readable.
• The daemon runs under daemon(8) with pidfile /var/run/fips/fips.pid and logs to /var/log/fips.log. The rc.conf knobs are fips_config, fips_flags, and fips_logfile.
• The control socket resolves to /var/run/fips/control.sock. As on Linux, a fips group is created and its members can run fipsctl and fipstop without root (pw groupmod fips -m <user>, then re-login).

Making the local resolver the system resolver is a one-time operator step the package deliberately does not take, and there are field-tested caveats around unbound upstreams and /etc/resolv.conf. Both are covered in the FreeBSD section of packaging/README.md and in packaging/freebsd/README.md.

From source

For development, custom builds, or unsupported architectures. The packaging/ tree builds the same installer formats locally; you then apply the resulting installer the same way you would a downloaded one.

git clone https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips.git
cd fips/packaging
make deb         # or: tarball, ipk, apk, aur, pkg, freebsd, zip, all

The resulting installer lands in deploy/ at the project root. Apply it the same way you would a downloaded one (for example sudo dpkg -i deploy/fips_*.deb on Debian/Ubuntu).

See packaging/README.md for per-format build details, cross-target options, and the full make target list.

With Nix (flake)

On Nix/NixOS, a flake at the project root builds the binaries from source with the pinned toolchain and no manual prerequisite install:

nix build .#fips          # all four binaries, into ./result/bin
nix develop               # dev shell with the toolchain + build deps

This path produces binaries only — it does not run the installer, so there are no systemd units, no fips group, and no default fips.yaml. On NixOS, wire the daemon in through your system configuration using the flake's nixosModules.default output instead: import it and set services.fips.enable = true. See packaging/nixos/README.md and the Nix / NixOS section of packaging/README.md.

What's installed and running

Here's what the installer leaves on your machine, what's running, and what you'll need to set up yourself.

Binaries installed system-wide:

• fips (daemon)
• fipsctl (control-socket client)
• fipstop (live-status TUI)
• fips-gateway (Linux only)

Files placed on disk:

• /etc/fips/fips.yaml — default daemon config (preserved on upgrade). On macOS and FreeBSD this is /usr/local/etc/fips/fips.yaml.
• /etc/fips/fips.nft — mesh-interface nftables baseline (used only when the firewall service is enabled). Linux only.
• /etc/fips/fips.d/ — empty drop-in directory for operator nftables additions. Linux only.
• Systemd, launchd, rc.d, or Windows-service unit files for the fips services. FreeBSD installs fips and fips_dns only, since fips-gateway and the nftables firewall service are Linux-only.

System changes:

• A fips system group is created. Add your user to it (sudo usermod -aG fips $USER, then re-login) to run fipsctl and fipstop without sudo.
• The runtime directory /run/fips/ exists with mode 0750 root:fips.

Services enabled at install, and started on the next boot:

• fips.service — the daemon. Brings up the fips0 TUN adapter, listens on the configured transports, and exposes the control socket at /run/fips/control.sock.
• fips-dns.service — wires .fips hostname resolution into the host resolver (a /etc/systemd/resolved.conf.d/ drop-in pointing at [::1]:5354 on systemd hosts).

The Debian package enables both and starts neither, so a fresh install leaves them stopped. Start them yourself rather than waiting for a reboot:

sudo systemctl start fips fips-dns

Services installed but not enabled (operator opt-in):

• fips-firewall.service — applies /etc/fips/fips.nft to the mesh interface. See how-to/enable-mesh-firewall.md.

What's working once both services are running:

• The daemon is running with a fresh ephemeral identity — a new Nostr keypair is generated on every start.
• The fips0 TUN adapter exists with the daemon's mesh address.
• The daemon's transport listeners are up: UDP 0.0.0.0:2121 and TCP 0.0.0.0:8443. They are inert at this point because no other node knows your daemon's npub yet — see "What's not yet configured" below.
• .fips hostname resolution is plumbed into the host resolver.

What's not yet configured — these are what guide your next steps:

• No peers. The daemon has nobody to talk to until you add a static peer entry, enable Nostr-mediated discovery, or bring up a transport (Ethernet, Bluetooth) where peers find each other automatically on the same physical link.
• Ephemeral identity. Your node's npub changes every restart. The persistent-identity tutorial walks through pinning the daemon to a stable Nostr keypair for any node others will reference by name.
• Mesh firewall not active. Inbound exposure on fips0 follows the host's existing firewall rules until you enable the baseline service.

Reaching mesh nodes by name

A FIPS node is identified by its Nostr public key (npub1...). For ordinary IP software running over the mesh — SSH, web browsers, ping, file transfer — use the form <npub>.fips as the destination; the local .fips resolver translates that to the corresponding mesh IPv6 address so the FIPS node can be found. The resolver runs entirely on your machine and does not generate any external DNS traffic.

For shorter forms, the resolver also consults two host maps before falling back to direct npub lookup: /etc/fips/hosts (shipped pre-populated with the public test mesh roster, and freely editable for your own entries) and the alias: field on configured peers in fips.yaml. So test-us01.fips, my-laptop.fips, or any other shortname you map resolves the same way <npub>.fips does. See how-to/host-aliases.md for the full mechanics.

Join the test mesh

The fastest way to see FIPS in action is to connect your daemon to the public FIPS test mesh. The Join the Test Mesh tutorial walks through adding a single static peer entry, watching the link come up, and reaching both that peer and a second mesh node forwarded through it — a ten-minute exercise that demonstrates the central FIPS guarantee that one good peer connects you to the rest of the mesh.

Where to go next

Documentation is organised into four sections, each with a different job. Pick the one that matches what you want to do.

Tutorials

Step-by-step lessons that take you from zero to a working setup. Read these end-to-end. Start with Join the Test Mesh and follow with ipv6-adapter-walkthrough to understand what each piece does, then move on to persistent-identity and the three Nostr-discovery tutorials — resolve-peers-via-nostr, advertise-your-node, and open-discovery — to give your node a stable npub, look up peer endpoints, publish your own, and join the ambient discovery namespace. Then host-a-service for hosting a service on your node, and ground-up-mesh for the second deployment mode where two devices peer over Ethernet, WiFi, or Bluetooth with no IP between them.

How-To Guides

Task-oriented recipes for operators with a specific goal: enable a firewall, deploy the LAN gateway, set up Bluetooth peering, diagnose an MTU problem, configure persistent identity. Each guide takes the shortest correct path from "I want to do X" to "X is done".

Reference

Lookup material consulted on demand: wire formats, configuration keys, command-line flags, control-socket commands. Austere by design; no guidance on when to use a feature.

Design

Architectural and protocol-level explanations: the mesh layer, the session layer, the spanning tree, Bloom-filter discovery, the unified MTU model, the IPv6 adapter. Read these to understand why FIPS makes the choices it does.

The design section's fips-concepts.md is a good entry point if you want the mental model before touching any commands.