jdbosser/personal_server

Get a nixos machine on digital ocean

Run nixos-infect. It can be done with the following command as root on an ubuntu 16.04 machine:

    git clone https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect
    sudo ./nixos-infect/nixos-infect

You will probably be kicked out from the server due to ssh not trusting it anymore. On your machine that has connected to digital ocean, run

    ssh-keygen -R <host>

So for example

    ssh-keygen -R 192.168.3.10

if your digital ocean server has the ip 192.168.3.10. Source.

Getting this repo onto the machine

You need git for this to work. Add git temporarly:

nix-shell -p git

and then you can

git clone https://github.com/jdbosser/personal_server.git

Now you need to add a link to the configuration file into /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

rm /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
ln -s $(pwd)/personal_server/configuration.nix /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

and place the hardware-configuration.nix and networking.nix files in the personal server folder

mv /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix personal_server/
mv /etc/nixos/networking.nix personal_server/

and finally run

nixos-rebuild switch

to get the server up and running.

Set up of domains

It is easy to link a domain if the domain has a digitial ocean nameserver. If that is the case, go to digital ocean panel for Networking and link domains.

If the domain is not in digital ocean, add it. Then, in hover, where I have bought my domains, you add the name servers to the domains:

	ns1.digitalocean.com
	ns2.digitalocean.com
	ns3.digitalocean.com

Default in hover is ns1.hover.com and ns2.hover.com. For other domain registrars, look at this resource

Documentation on how I went about setting up configuration.nix

Setup nginx

In your /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file, add the following:

  # Setup firewall
  networking.firewall.enable = true;
  networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 80 443 ];

  # Setup nginx
  services.nginx.enable = true;

which is pretty self explanatory to get nginx up and running.

Setup defualt virtualHost

Setting up a virtualHost to be accessed from the normal ip adress was a little bit more difficult than expected, but ended up with only a handful of files. First, I created a simple website in a folder test_website/index.html containing

    <h1> Hej och välkommen! </h1>

which in English translates to "Hello and welcome!". Next, I made sure that nginx has access to the file. It seems lite nginx needs to have read access in the whole file tree. In my case, I located the test website in /var/www/test_website. Thus, giving all applications and groups read permission in /root will let nginx see the test website. This is probably not a really good idea. Could be better to place the website in /etc/www like most people do.

    chmod -R 755 /root

Next, we declare a virtualHost in the configuration.nix-file:

  # Setup default virtualhost
  services.nginx.virtualHosts.<ip> = {
    root = "/var/www/test_website";
    default = true;
    listen = [ {addr = "<ip>"; port = 80;} ];
    locations= {
        "/" = {
                tryFiles = "$uri $uri/index.html";
        };
    };
  };

Which line by line is

1. A comment
2. Where the files for the test website are located
3. If someone visits the ip for the server, this is the website to display. Do not know if this is needed when the virtualHost name is the ip.
4. The server listens for requests on the ip adress on the default port.
5. If someone visits the ip directly, make sure we return the index.html file.

Setup of https

Setting up https was pretty straight forward. I had a lot of trouble getting the subdomain www to work. In the end, i failed to get https work for both without setting up two servers. Anyway, I changed the virtualhost to this:

  services.nginx.virtualHosts."<domain>" = {
    root = "/var/www/test_website";
    default = true;
    forceSSL = true;
    enableACME = true;
    locations= {
    	"/" = {
		tryFiles = "$uri $uri/index.html";
	};
    };

which was the only way to do it it seems like.

Setup of minecraft

Minecraft-server is already among the nixos modules.

However, there is one wierd thing that happens whenever the minecraft-server.service is running: it is no longer possible to rebuild the system since nixos cannot connect to the deamon. I am getting errors like:

cannot open connection to remote store 'daemon': writing to file: Broken pipe

when running nixos-rebuild switch. To fix this, make sure that the minecraft-server.service is stopped before running nixos-rebuild switch