Goodbye Buffer: How I self-hosted Postiz in 5 minutes with auto script

If you are like me, you are probably tired of the mounting costs of monthly subscriptions. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Typefully are great, but for a self-hoster and tech enthusiast, paying $20-$50 a month for something I can host myself feels unnecessary.

I recently switched my workflow to Postiz, and honestly, it’s a game-changer. It is an open-source, all-in-one social media scheduling tool that supports X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and even Reddit.

In this post, I want to share my experience deploying Postiz. Because the architecture involves complex components like Temporal and Redis, it can be a headache to set up manually. To solve this, I wrote an Automated Setup Script that gets the whole stack running on your server or Mac in one command.

Why I Switched to Postiz

I didn’t just want a cron job that posts text; I needed a robust system. Here is why Postiz stood out to me during my testing:

True Multi-Platform Support: It handles everything from short-form tweets to long-form LinkedIn articles.
The “Temporal” Advantage: Postiz uses Temporal for its backend. This is enterprise-grade tech. It means if my server blips or restarts, the scheduled post doesn’t fail—it retries intelligently.
AI Integration: It hooks into OpenAI to help rewrite captions or generate ideas when I’m stuck.
Data Ownership: All my analytics and draft content stay on my hardware, not someone else’s cloud.

My Setup & Requirements

Postiz is powerful, which means it is slightly heavier than a basic script. It uses ElasticSearch and Temporal, so you need a bit of juice.

Here is the hardware I am currently running this on:

My Home Lab: Mac Mini M4 running OrbStack (highly recommended for Apple Silicon users over Docker Desktop).
Production VPS: Ubuntu 22.04 (AMD64).

Minimum Specs:

RAM: 4GB is the absolute minimum, but I recommend 8GB if you plan to use it heavily.
CPU: 2 vCPU or better.
Software: Docker & Docker Compose.

The 5-Minute Installation Guide

I created a bash script to handle the heavy lifting. It automatically detects your OS, generates the necessary security secrets, configures Caddy for SSL (https), and sets up the Docker networking.

Step 1: Run the Auto-Installer

Open your terminal (or SSH into your VPS) and run the following command. This will create a directory and pull the script from my repository:

# Create directory and run the setup script
mkdir -p ~/postiz && cd ~/postiz
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/duynghien/auto/main/postiz/setup.sh
chmod +x setup.sh
./setup.sh

Step 2: Interactive Configuration

The script is interactive. It will ask you for two things:

Domain: Enter your custom domain (e.g., social.addrom.com). If you are testing locally like I did initially, just use localhost.
Email: This is used by Caddy to auto-generate your SSL certificate so your connection is secure.

Once you hit enter, grab a coffee (or a matcha). The script will pull the images for Next.js, Postgres, Redis, Temporal, and ElasticSearch. On my connection, this took about 3 minutes.

Post-Installation Configuration

Once the script finishes, you will see a success message. Here is how to finalize the setup:

1. The Admin Account

Head over to your domain (e.g., https://social.addrom.com). You will be greeted by the landing page. Click “Sign up” to create your primary admin user.

2. Connecting Social Networks (API Keys)

This is the only manual part of the process. Because this is self-hosted, you need to be the “developer.” You will need to create apps on the platforms you want to use (X, LinkedIn, etc.) to get your Client ID and Client Secret.

Reference: Postiz Official Documentation

How to inject the keys:
I made sure the script creates a clean .env file for you. Just edit it:

cd ~/postiz
nano .env

Scroll down to the Social Media API Settings area and paste your credentials:

# Example configuration
X_API_KEY="your_twitter_api_key"
X_API_SECRET="your_twitter_api_secret"

LINKEDIN_CLIENT_ID="your_linkedin_id"
LINKEDIN_CLIENT_SECRET="your_linkedin_secret"

Save the file (Ctrl+O, Enter) and exit (Ctrl+X).

3. Restart the Stack

To apply those API keys, you need to restart the containers. I included a helper tool for this:

./postiz.sh restart

Managing Your Instance

To keep things simple, I didn’t want to memorize Docker Compose commands every time. So, the installation includes a postiz.sh helper script:

Check Health: ./postiz.sh status (Checks if Temporal and Redis are talking to each other).
View Logs: ./postiz.sh logs (Great for debugging if a post fails).
Update: ./postiz.sh update (Pulls the latest code from the Postiz repository).

Final Thoughts

Self-hosting isn’t just about saving money; it’s about control. With Postiz running on my Mac Mini (and synced via Cloudflare Tunnels for external access), I have a professional-grade scheduling tool that rivals the expensive SaaS giants.

If you are a developer or a creator looking to own your distribution channel, I highly recommend giving this stack a try.

You can find the full source code for my automation scripts on my GitHub.