🧠 Self-Hosting a Nostr Relay on Raspberry Pi + Automating Reddit Posts with n8n & Python

In this post, I’ll walk through how I: Set up a self-hosted Nostr relay using Rust on a Raspberry Pi Wrote a Python bot (EGBot) to post content to my relay Automated Reddit → Nostr posting using n8n

🛠️ Part 1: Running a Self-Hosted Nostr Relay on Raspberry Pi

I started by deploying a Nostr relay using [the Rust implementation](<https://github.com/scsibug/nostr-rs-relay>) on a Raspberry Pi 5. It's lightweight and perfect for a low-power device.

🔧 Configuration

In my relay config config.toml), I added two key restrictions to keep it clean and minimal:

1. Event Kind Allowlist

Only specific Nostr event kinds are accepted. Others are discarded.

event_kind_allowlist = [0, 1, 2, 3, 7, 40, 10002]

• | 0 | Metadata | Stores user profile metadata: name, about, picture, etc. This is the standard user profile event. |

• | 1 | Text Note | The most common kind — used for normal posts, messages, thoughts, etc. |

• | 2 | Recommend Relay | Users can publish events recommending relays. Helps clients discover relays to connect to. |

• | 3 | Contacts (Following List) | Stores a user’s list of followed pubkeys. Often used by clients to display “follows”. |

• | 7 | Reaction | Like a “like” or emoji reaction to another event. |

• | 40 | Channel Creation (for kind 41 chats) | Used to define a new channel (in Nostr chat/group systems). |

• | 10002 | Relay List Metadata | Lets users publish a list of relays they read/write to — often used for syncing with clients. |

2. Author Allowlist

Only events signed by my personal keys are allowed to be published:

`authorized_pubkeys = ["npub1yourpubkeyhere..."]

This ensures the relay won't be used by spammers or unknown clients. It's my private, write-only relay. Ofcourse People can read from it.

I have also added indexing support for my relay. This will help people to search posts on my relay.

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🔑 Part 2: Generating Nostr Keys

I generated a fresh Nostr keypair from scratch and converted it into the npub format using Bech32. I kept the nsec safe and used the npub to authorize writing to my relay.

You can generate keys using:

nostr-tools generate

or from Python, Rust, or a CLI like nostr-key.

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🐍 Part 3: Writing to the Relay (EGBot in Python)

To publish events to my relay, I wrote a small Python script I call EGBot. It:

• Signs Nostr events using my private key

• Posts them to my local relay via WebSocket or REST

• Encapsulates post data like Reddit title, URL, etc.

This script acts as the backend for injecting custom content into my relay.

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⚙️ Part 4: Automating Reddit → Nostr via n8n

To make the bot work on its own, I used [n8n](

https://n8n.io)

— a powerful open-source automation tool.

🔄 The Flow:

1. Schedule Trigger

Runs every 8 hours/ whenever ocean mining pool mints a block

2. RSS Feed Node

• Fetches the latest posts from the Machine learning news subreddit.

• SAT 2 USD price

• Whenever ocean mining pool mints a block

• Every morning, DeepLearning papers from arxiv
  
  

3. Filter Node

Filters out old posts or irrelevant ones using pub\_date vs current time.

4. Function/Code Node

• Uses JavaScript to:

• Strip HTML

• Decode entities

• Clean up titles/content

5. HTTP Request Node

Calls my REST API (Python bot) to trigger the post to my relay.

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🔐 Why Only My Relay?

I’ve limited the bot to post only to my own self-hosted relay, because:

• I want to avoid spamming the wider Nostr network

• My relay acts as a personal content mirror/archive

• It gives me full editorial and moderation control

This way, the content is preserved on Nostr, but without polluting public relays.

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🔭 What’s Next?

• I am experimenting with homomorphic encryption over Nostr. I will use this bot to do some experiments around it.

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🧪 Live Bot

You can follow the bot on Nostr:

https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqsgm93zkrqzxdkfcd3lwplapz9grwn0lwyt8gnxc8qnh2p9cwws7jqevrumf