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I enjoy making TODO-lists quite a lot. They've been a helpful way for me to collect my thoughts and manage my time. Lately I've been working on a gemini client app that's been getting steadily more complex (as these things often do). The project has gotten to the point that each time I step away from it I find myself struggling to pick up where I last left off.
Yesterday I came to the conclusion that if I want to continue working on this project in the long-term, I will need to find a better way to manage in-process tasks.
I often use a paper TODO-list for this kind of thing, but lately I've been trying to reduce the amount of clutter on my desk. It therefore seemed only reasonable that I search for a digital alternative.
I ended up settling on a self-hostable web service called *myTinyTodo*.
I appreciate its support for markdown and its tagging feature, and I was impressed by how easy it was to set up on my VPS. The whole process took less than ten minutes. I'll detail the steps I took to set it up below.
The developer has installation instructions, which can be found here. There are just four steps.
For context, I'm running this on a rented 4GB Arch Linux VPS. The setup should be pretty distro-agnostic.
For my particular setup, I made use of the following:
myTinyTodo supports both SQLite and MySQL database engines. I chose to use MySQL because I have an instance set up already. I might have chosen SQLite if I wanted to run this in an underprivileged or resource-constrained environment where MySQL isn't an option.
I started by creating a system user account called "mytinytodo". This account will be used for running the FastCGI pools and will own all of the myTinyTodo files.
useradd --system -U -s /usr/bin/nologin mytinytodo
I then downloaded and extracted the myTinyTodo application files to a directory in /srv.
wget https://github.com/maxpozdeev/mytinytodo/releases/download/v1.7.6/mytinytodo-v1.7.6.tar.gz tar -xf mytinytodo-v1.7.6.tar.gz cp -r ./mytinytodo /srv/mytinytodo
I can't be bothered to remember the syntax for the 'find' command, so I modify the following script and run it when I need to set directory permissions:
#!/bin/sh
find $1 -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec chown -R mytinytodo:mytinytodo {} \;
for repo in $(find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d);
do
find $repo -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find $repo -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
done
As a security measure, I created a new PHP-FPM application pool which will run as this restricted user account.
I copied the default 'www' pool configuration...
cd /etc/php/php-fpm.d/ cp www.conf mytinytodo.conf
... and changed four lines in mytinytodo.conf to the following:
[mytinytodo] ... user = mytinytodo group = mytinytodo ... listen = /run/php-fpm/mytinytodo.sock
In order to allow myTinyTodo to coexist with the other web apps running on my VPS, I configured a new subdomain with my domain registrar.
I then created a new NGINX config file to pass incoming requests to the FastCGI pools (use your own server_name obviously):
server {
server_name your.domain.here;
listen 80;
index index.php;
root /srv/mytinytodo;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
error_page 404 /index.php;
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri $document_root$fastcgi_script_name =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php-fpm/mytinytodo.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY "";
fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
fastcgi_request_buffering off;
}
}
I'm not the most knowledgeable NGINX buff, so most of the fastcgi lines are copied from somewhere else.
Finally, I reloaded php-fpm and NGINX, then ran Certbot and followed its prompts to set up a TLS certificate for this new subdomain.
systemctl restart php-fpm systemctl restart nginx certbot
Certbot will add some extra lines to your NGINX configuration; it will reload NGINX so that those changes take effect immediately.
By this point, I had NGINX forwarding incoming requests to a few FastCGI pools, which in turn are running under a restricted user account. Traffic to and from the server is encrypted with a signed Let's Encrypt certificate which Certbot will automatically renew (if you've configured it to do so).
That was a lot, but what I've outlined is a useful set of steps to securely set up many kinds of web services. Proxying requests to a restricted application pool is a commonplace task as far as web servers go.
At this point I could access and configure myTinyTodo through its web interface. According to the steps on the developer's website, this involves navigating to /setup.php and entering the database credentials.
Thank you for reading all this. I wrote this mainly to help myself remember how I set this up, as well as to help anyone else who is looking for instructions on configuring a relatively secure environment for such an application. I welcome all suggestions and criticism, as I'm by no means an expert Linux sysadmin.
2023-09-24 · 9 months ago
