Install Reacher in 20min

Reacher is designed for seamless self-hosting, giving you full control over its operation on your infrastructure. This guide demonstrates how to install and run Reacher on your local computer in under 20 minutes, using a Dockerfile that is provided you as part of the commercial-license-trial.md.

Prerequisites

An account on https://reacher.email (required for the Commercial License Trial and access to the Dockerfile).
Docker installed on your system (follow the Docker installation guide for your OS).

Tutorial Scope: Install Reacher on your local computer

Reacher’s stateless architecture enables easy horizontal scaling by deploying multiple containers, each running a Reacher instance for parallel email verifications. However, for simplicity, this tutorial focuses on a local installation. A further section focuses on scaling-for-production.

The provided Dockerfile includes a pre-configured proxy, resolving the common ISP restriction on outgoing requests to port 25 used by Reacher to perform SMTP verifications.

<details> <summary>Understand the features and limitations of the Commercial License Trial.</summary>

The Dockerfile provided as part of the Commercial License Trial is designed to enable quick setup for email verifications. Below are its key features and limitations:

Built-in Proxy Configuration: we use Proxy4Smtp, a 3rd-party proxy with carefully maintained IPs optimized for SMTP verifications. This ensures reliable email verification even in cloud environments with restricted SMTP access. Learn more in proxies.
Daily Verification Limit: capped at 60 per minute at 10,000 per day.
Usage Tracking: verification results are anonymized and sent back to Reacher, and used to monitor daily usage and detect potential abuse.

You can also read more in commercial-license-trial.md.

</details>

Step-by-Step Tutorial

Navigate to the Commercial License Trial tab of your Reacher Dashboard (go there directly). You'll see a command to run Reacher's latest (v0.10) Docker image:

bash

docker run -e RCH__COMMERCIAL_LICENSE_TRIAL__API_TOKEN=<YOUR_UNIQUE_TOKEN> -p 8080:8080 reacherhq/commercial-license-trial:latest # v0.10

Replace <YOUR_UNIQUE_TOKEN> with your unique API token shown in the dashboard.

Expected output:

bash

2024-09-19T12:58:32.918254Z  INFO reacher: Running Reacher version="0.10.0"
Starting ChromeDriver 124.0.6367.78 (a087f2dd364ddd58b9c016ef1bf563d2bc138711-refs/branch-heads/6367@{#954}) on port 9515
Only local connections are allowed.
Please see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/security-considerations for suggestions on keeping ChromeDriver safe.
ChromeDriver was started successfully.
2024-09-19T12:58:32.976589Z  INFO reacher: Server is listening host=0.0.0.0 port=80

If you see an error message, such as Error: missing field `api_token`, double-check the -e RCH__COMMERCIAL_LICENSE_TRIAL__API_TOKEN flag you passed. If you see other errors, either try debugging-reacher.md or send an email to [email protected].

Advanced users can also set additional reacher-configuration-v0.10.md.

Verify an email by running the following command in another terminal.

<pre class="language-bash"><code class="lang-bash"><strong>curl -X POST \ </strong> -H'Content-Type: application/json' \ -d'{"to_email":"[email protected]"}' \ http://localhost:8080/v1/check_email </code></pre>

Advanced users can pass additional configuration fields to the v1-check_email.md endpoint.

If successful, you'll see JSON object with an is_reachable field.

json

{
    "input": "[email protected]",
    "is_reachable": "safe",
    // --snip--
}

You can read more about all the fields in is-reachable.md.

{% hint style="warning" %} If this step hangs for a long time, or returns a JSON result with is_reachable="unknown", see debugging-reacher.mdon how to fix this. {% endhint %}

If you go back to check the terminal with the Docker command, you should see corresponding logs:

log

// --snip--
2024-12-15T11:33:36.169891Z  INFO reacher: Starting verification email="[email protected]"
2024-12-15T11:33:45.015130Z  INFO reacher: Done verification email="[email protected]" is_reachable=Safe

Congratulations! You just successfully verified an email from your computer. Now it's time to think about scaling-for-production.

Troubleshooting

If you have any issue in one of the steps above, you can try debugging-reacher.mdyourself, or send me an email [email protected].