Installation

Prerequisites

First of all, you need a server – physical server, VDS or VPS – anything that allows you to ssh into it, download binary and execute it. Preferably Linux, but that is up to you.

You need to have ffmpeg and ffprobe available on $PATH if you want CDN to be able to properly handle all media formats. At the time of writing (August 2026) server uses ffmpeg for video dimensions detection, video preview frame extraction and video-to-gif conversion, but it is highly likely that more features would rely on ffmpeg as server grows.

ffmpeg installation help: linux, mac, windows.

You should consider putting a server behind a reverse proxy because these nice things below is out of project’s scope and is not implemented in the server:

• http2 and http3 protocols;
• https (TLS);
• gzip compression;
• rate-limiting;
• bot / AI scraper detection;
• Content Security Policy (CSP);

For a development, testing and learning purposes reverse proxy is not necessary, localhost server would work just fine, but in production reverse proxy is strictly necessary. We use nginx, but any other proxy (like apache for example) should work just fine.

Download

Server is distributed as all-in-one binary and requires no installation. You can download binary from Releases page.

Build from source

Alternatively you can build server from source.

TODO: point to dev/build.md

Place it on your server

Basically you want to just:

mkdir my-server && cd my-server
mv ~/Downloads/dcas .
./dcas --help

That’s enough to “install” the server.