mnnpr

Selfhosting Update

As you know, I was using a Hetzner VPS for hosting various services like Nextcloud, Email and this very blog. But last night I decided to nuke my VPS and now I{{content}}#x2019;m waiting for my domain to expire.

The main reason I decided to go this route is because my self hosted email was giving me a lot of headaches. I was constantly worried about mail deliverability. On top of that, It{{content}}#x2019;s not like everyone has GPG set up, so I{{content}}#x2019;ve decided to settle with Tutanota for now. Tutanota provides 1GB of storage in their basic plan and it provides a way to send encrypted messages to non Tutanota users as well.

Having a VPS just for Cloud and Web Hosting seemed a little excessive to me. So I{{content}}#x2019;ve shifted my blog to Github Pages and in place of NextCloud, I{{content}}#x2019;ve set up a very simple DAV Server on my raspberry pi. For storing some important documents, I{{content}}#x2019;m using megatools on my phone and laptop to upload/download files to/from my Mega.nz account.

For my domain name, I{{content}}#x2019;m using dynu. They provide free subdomains with a DDNS service. So I have a blahblahblah.dynu.net domain now and a bash script running on my pi constantly updates the A records to point to my current IP.

Generating SSL Certificates

When I started with this process, I was under the impression that generating SSL certificates for my new domain would be a pretty straightforward process using Certbot. But sadly, Certbot is not able to pass the ACME challenges for dynu. So instead, I had to use the acme.sh script which has a separate plugin for dynu.
To use that plugin, first we need to install the acme.sh script -

curl https://get.acme.sh | sh

Next, head to the dynu control panel and look for the API Credentials option. Then export them as your environment variables as shown -

export Dynu_ClientId={{content}}quot;xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx{{content}}quot;
export Dynu_Secret={{content}}quot;yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy{{content}}quot;
acme.sh --issue --dns dns_dynu -d mydyndomain.dynu.net

And if all work as expected, you will get your certificates.

Setting Up CardDAV/CalDAV

When I started looking for DAV servers, the application I first came across was Radicale. I spent a good hour to set that up but still couldn{{content}}#x2019;t get it to behave nicely. IMO don{{content}}#x2019;t waste your time with that application. I{{content}}#x2019;m currently using Baikal and it{{content}}#x2019;s very nice.

It just needs PHP7, SQlite and Nginx to function. Just extract the latest release from github into your webroot (/var/www/). Then setup a Nginx site as shown -

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name blahblahblah.dynu.net;
    return 301 https://blahblahblah.dynu.net$request_uri;
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name blahblahblah.dynu.net;

  ssl_certificate /home/user/.acme.sh/blahblahblah.dynu.net/blahblahblah.dynu.net.cer;
  ssl_certificate_key /home/user/.acme.sh/blahblahblah.dynu.net/blahblahblah.dynu.net.key;

  root /var/www/baikal/html;
  index index.php;

  rewrite ^/.well-known/caldav /dav.php redirect;
  rewrite ^/.well-known/carddav /dav.php redirect;

  charset utf-8;

  location ~ /(\.ht|Core|Specific) {
    deny all;
    return 404;
  }

  location ~ ^(.+\.php)(.*)$ {
    try_files $fastcgi_script_name =404;
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
  }
}

and you are done! Just open the URL in your browser and go through the one time admin setup. Then you can create a new user and setup syncing on your phone using Davx5.

Sources:


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