Installing I2P in Docker

Very quick start

If you just want to give I2P a quick try or are using it in a home network, follow these steps:

1. Create two directories "i2pconfig" and "i2ptorrents"
2. Copy the following text and save it in a file "docker-compose.yml".

version: "3.5"
services:
    i2p:
        image: geti2p/i2p
        network_mode: host
        volumes:
            - ./i2pconfig:/i2p/.i2p
            - ./i2ptorrents:/i2psnark

3. Execute "docker-compose up"
4. Start a browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:7657 to complete the setup wizard.

Note that this quick-start approach is not recommended for production deployments on remote servers. Please read the rest of this document for more information.

Building an image

There is an i2P image available over at DockerHub. If you do not want to use that one, you can build one yourself:

docker build -t i2p .

Running a container

Volumes

The container requires a volume for the configuration data to be mounted. Optionally, you can mount a separate volume for torrent (“i2psnark”) downloads. See the example below.

Memory usage

By default the image limits the memory available to the Java heap to 512MB. You can override that with the JVM_XMX environment variable.

Порти

There are several ports which are exposed by the image. You can choose which ones to publish depending on your specific needs.

You probably want at least the Router Console (7657) and the HTTP Proxy (4444). If you want I2P to be able to receive incoming connections from the internet, and hence not think it’s firewalled, publish the I2NP Protocol port (12345) - but make sure you publish to a different random port, otherwise others may be able to guess you’re running I2P in a Docker image.

Мережа

A best-practices guide for cloud deployments is beyond the scope of this document, but in general you should try to minimize the number of published ports, while exposing only the I2NP ports to the internet. That means that the services in the list above which are bound to 127.0.0.1 (which include the router console) will need to be accessed via other methods like ssh tunneling or be manually configured to bind to a different interface.

Example

Here is an example container that mounts i2phome as home directory, i2ptorrents for torrents, and opens HTTP Proxy, IRC, Router Console and I2NP Protocols. It also limits the memory available to the JVM to 256MB.

docker run \
    -e JVM_XMX=256m \
    -v i2phome:/i2p/.i2p \
    -v i2ptorrents:/i2psnark \
    -p 4444:4444 \
    -p 6668:6668 \
    -p 7657:7657 \
    -p 54321:12345 \
    -p 54321:12345/udp \  # I2NP port needs TCP and UDP.  Change the 54321 to something random, greater than 1024.
    i2p:latest