Noisy Baja

A playground for learning how to configure a combination of Federated Wiki, Traefik load-balancer, and docker-compose to tie them together. Some chance this will grow to become the basis of a full-featured commons wiki server, but we confine ourselves to a sandbox for now to build some confidence in the configurations and abstractions we discover.

Bootstrapping

Droplet

Created a Digital Ocean droplet with the docker template from the marketplace. https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/docker

Clone sourcecode

git clone https://github.com/Commons-Server/noisy-baja.git
cd noisy-baja

Customize your .env file

cp ./.env.example .env

Edit .env with your own sub-domain and Let's Encrypt email addresses.

DNS

Created an A record for sub-domain (in my case commons.dbbs.co) to the IP of new droplet.

Created a companion wildcard CNAME (*.commons.dbbs.co) pointed at the sub-domain.

Created an API token, specifically a "Personal access token" with both read and write access. (https://cloud.digitalocean.com/account/api/tokens). Digital Ocean will only let you see this token at the time you create it. So copy the token from the UI and paste the value into a new file: ./keys/do-auth-token. For good measure also limited the file permissions like so:

chmod 600 ./keys/do-auth-token

This token gets rsync'd to the droplet in the step below. It is worth noting that as the ./keys folder has been specified in the .gitignore file, we avoid the risk of checking this file back into GitHub. The traefik load-balancer uses this key for Let's Encrypt's DNS-based challenge.

Wiki Config

We will setup the example using friends security.

cd examples/friends
cp .env.example .env

Edit the .env file with your own DOMAIN, COOKIE_SECRET, AUTHOR and PASSWORD. Then rsync the configs to the digital ocean droplet.

cd ../..
ssh root@$DOMAIN mkdir -p Commons-Server/noisy-baja
rsync -a --exclude='.git/' ./ root@$DOMAIN:Commons-Server/noisy-baja/

Install the friends configuration

ssh root@$DOMAIN
cd Commons-Server/noisy-baja
docker-compose \
  -f docker-compose.yaml \
  -f examples/friends/docker-compose.yaml \
  run --rm config

Start Containers

docker-compose up -d

Test

Try visiting these sites to confirm the installation worked.

• https://whoami.$DOMAIN
• https://wiki.$DOMAIN