Thursday, July 25, 2019

Note that yesterday was a historic day: I saw for the first time a production Lino running under nginx. I believe that nginx is better for Lino than apache because it is more lightweight and in Python. Until now we always used apache as web server. The getlino : the Lino installer project gave us motivation to do the step.

getlino

I had a nightly session for #3036 (getlino : the Lino installer):

• added configs for monit and logrotate

• libreoffice was being started as www-data (must be root)

• fixed at least one other bug

• optimized the user experience by avoiding useless questions

• new method Installer.override_batch()

getlino 2

Morning session: get http basic auth and webdav to work.

Which variant of the nginx system package do we need? light, full, extras?

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/553937/what-is-the-difference-between-the-core-full-extras-and-light-packages-for-ngi

• http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_dav_module.html

• https://starbeamrainbowlabs.com/blog/article.php?article=posts%2F237-WebDav-Nginx-Setup.html

• https://wiki.debian.org/Nginx

The last mentioned link says it cleary : ‘light’, ‘full’ and ‘extras’ contain different modules, nginx-light being the lighter and nginx-extras being the heavier. nginx-full is in the middle, being installed with the metapackage nginx (nginx-full is not installed if nginx-light is already installed).

As it seems we just need nginx (the meta package which actually will install nginx-full), which has both AuthBasic and WebDav.

Actually in weleup they need (1) LDAP authentication and (2) webdav. The http basic authentication is actually rather disturbing for them because it means that they need to close their browser if they want to sign in using another account.

I re-discovered Authentication and reviewed it.

nginx and certbot (--https)

Hamza and I had a look at FreedomBox, but it seems that this is not maintained. dynu.com seems more sustainable.

getlino must not also provide a --dynamic-ip option (to automatically install some dns client), so the choice of how a domain name point to the server remains responsibility of the getlino user (the server operator).

Hamza also discovered ngrok.io who provide both : dynamic IP and https. But that’s unfortunately not useful to use since neither Hamza nor I want to really serve content, we just need a dynamic dns client to simulate the situation of a real Lino server with static IP.