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Getting Started

There are two paths to starting your own room: creating a build from source, or downloading one of the premade releases.

Premade builds

See the releases page for packaged linux releases.

We currently only distributed pre-packaged releases for Debian-compatible distributions. See Issue #79 for the details. If this doesn't work for you, read the "Creating a build" section below.

After running sudo dpkg -i go-ssb-room_v1.2.3_linux_amd64.deb pay special attention to the postinstall notes for how to configure the systemd file and webserver.

Creating a build

Docker & Docker-compose

This project includes a docker-compose.yml file as well as a Docker file. Using it should be fairly straight forward.

Start off by making a copy of .env_example called .env and insert your website domain there. With that done execute

docker-compose build room

Followed by

docker-compose up

Your database, secrets and other things will be synchronized to a folder in your project called "docker-secrets".

After starting your server for the first time you need to enter your running server to insert your first user (your docker-compose up should be active). You can do this by:

docker-compose exec room sh

Then inside the virtual machine:

/app/cmd/insert-user/insert-user -repo /ssb-go-room-secrets @your-own-ssb-public-key

Fill in your password and then exit your instance by typing exit.

You should setup Nginx or HTTPS load-balancing outside the docker-compose instance.

HTTP Hosting

We currently assume a standard HTTPS server in front of go-ssb-room to facilitate TLS termination and certificate management. This should be possible with most modern HTTP servers since it's a pretty standard practice, known as reverse proxying.

Two bits of rationale:

  1. People usually want to have more than one site on their server. Put differently, we could have LetsEncrypt inside the go-ssb-room server but it would have to listen on port :443—blocking the use of other domains on the same IP.
  2. Listening on :443 can be pretty annoying (you might need root privileges or similar capabilities).

go-ssb-room needs three headers to function properly, which need to be forwarded by the webserver.

  • X-Forwarded-Host as which domain name the room is running (enforce strict TLS checking)
  • X-Forwarded-Proto to ensure that TLS is used (and redirect if necessary)
  • X-Forwarded-For the remote TCP/IP address of the client accessing the room (used for rate limiting)

example-nginx.conf contains an nginx config that we use for hermies.club. To get a wildcard TLS certificate you can follow the steps in this article, which uses the certbot utility.

For example, to get a wildcard SSL certificate for hermies.club, we typically run

certbot certonly --manual --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory \
  --preferred-challenges dns-01 \
  -d 'hermies.club' -d '*.hermies.club'

(Replace hermies.club with your room's domain, of course)

certbot will tell you to update TXT DNS records with the key _acme-challenge.hermies.club but be carefully with your DNS provider because you may have to input just _acme-challenge since the rest is often added automatically by your provider.

When the process is complete with certbot, pay attention to where the certificate has been placed in the filesystem. If it's at /etc/letsencrypt/live/hermies.club, it's correct, otherwise you may need to rename it e.g. hermies.club-0001 to hermies.club.

The example nginx configuration uses prebuilt Diffie-Hellman parameters. You can generate these with the following command:

openssl dhparam -out /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem 2048

Then restart your server, e.g. systemctl restart nginx.

If you see such errors as the following when setting up your deployment:

nginx: [emerg] unknown "connection_upgrade" variable

You may need to configure $connection_upgrade in your /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. See this article for more.

Enable TCP ports

For your room to fully work the following TCP ports need to be allowed:

  • 80 (HTTP)
  • 443 (HTTPS)
  • 8008 (SSB)

Example

Using a Debian-compatible distribution with ufw, execute the commands below:

sudo ufw allow http
sudo ufw allow https
sudo ufw allow 8008/tcp

First Admin user

To manage your now working server, you need an initial admin user. For this you can use the "insert-user" utility included with go-ssb-room.

If you installed the Debian package, you will first need to install Go to build the "insert-user" utility. You can do this via:

sudo apt-get install golang-go

(WARNING: please check that golang-go is >= 1.17 and if not, you may need to use the official installation documentation instead. go-ssb-room requires at least Go 1.17.)

In a new terminal window navigate to the insert-user utility folder and compile the GO-based utility into an executable your computer can use

cd cmd/insert-user
go build

A new executable file should be created called "insert-user" Execute the ./insert-user -h command to get a full list of custom options (optional location of the repo & SQLite database and user role). follow the instructions given in the output you receive.

example (with custom repo location, only needed if you setup your with a custom repo):

./insert-user -repo "/ssb-go-room-secrets" "@Bp5Z5TQKv6E/Y+QZn/3LiDWMPi63EP8MHsXZ4tiIb2w=.ed25519"

Or if you installed go-ssb-room using the Debian package:

sudo ./insert-user -repo "/var/lib/go-ssb-room" "@Bp5Z5TQKv6E/Y+QZn/3LiDWMPi63EP8MHsXZ4tiIb2w=.ed25519"

It will ask you to create a password to access the web-front-end. You can now login in the web-front-end using these credentials.