If you are into Linux or the Security field you most likely have heard the terms: PGP, GPG, GnuPG, OpenPGP. They sometimes are being used interchangeably to describe e.g. how to encrypt mails or how to verify signatures of installed programs and packages. It might be difficult for new users to understand the differences, and how the PGP encryption works, but it is simple if explained.
In this post we will see, how we can get an SSL certificate for our Apache or Nginx server with Certbot from Let’s Encrypt.
An Ubuntu or Debian server (tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian 10) that you have SSH access and root or sudo privileges.
You can follow the SSH Server & UFW Configure guide to set up SSH best practices and configure a basic firewall.
In this post we will see how we can install the Nginx web server in our Ubuntu server, and how to configure it to serve some files.
If you have already a web server installed, like Apache, you either have to uninstall it or change the default port that is listening because it will conflict with Nginx.
We install nginx and any required dependencies:
sudo apt install nginx
After you have followed the initial server setup and enabled the UFW firewall, make sure that your firewall allows HTTP and HTTPS traffic. You can check that UFW has an application profile for Nginx like so:
In this post, we will see how we can run Node-RED using Docker Containers on our Ubuntu Server. Node-RED is a flow-based development tool for visual programming, for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services as part of the Internet of Things.
The light-weight runtime is built on Node.js, taking full advantage of its event-driven, non-blocking model. The flows created in Node-RED are stored using JSON which can be easily imported and exported for sharing with others.
In this post, we will see how we can run Home Assistant using Docker Containers on our Ubuntu Server. Home Assistant is an open source home automation tool that we can run on a local server to integrate with another Smart Home service or sensors and micro-controller.
There are a lot of installations method available, that you can find in the Installation page of Home Assistant, but we will use Docker containers to easily deploy the software.
In this post, we will see how we can run Portainer in order to manage our Docker containers. Portainer offers a Web UI that we can use to build and manage containers in Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes and Azure ACI. If you have not already, see how to install Docker on your Ubuntu/Debian server.
Portainer comes in two flavours Portainer CE and Portainer Business.
We will deploy Portainer CE on our Ubuntu Server using Docker containers. Portainer is comprised of two elements, the Portainer Server, and the Portainer Agent. We will run only the Portainer Server without the Portainer Agent for simplicity as we don’t need the features of the Agent right now.
In this post, we will see how we can install Grafana in our Ubuntu Server. Grafana is an open-source data visualization and monitoring tool that can easily be integrated with other tools.
We will install Grafana in our server as a service and not in a container.
We have more than one way to install Grafana:
.deb packageWe will show the last method, because we don’t have to manually update the package ourselves.
In this post, we will see how we can install the latest version of InfluxDB (ver 2.0) in our Ubuntu Server. With the new version there’s only one thing to download and install and we can avoid installing the TICK Stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor).
The new version is not a simple time-series database anymore, but also a platform for querying, visualization and data manipulation.
We have more than one way to install InfluxDB 2.0:
Homer is a dead simple static HOMepage for your servER to keep your services on hand, from a simple yaml configuration file.
We can use this app in order to have a homepage for all our services, apps and links of our server into one place, and edit only one yaml file.
In order to run the app we need Docker installed in our system, as it is going to be run as a container. We will also need Docker Compose if we are going to use Compose to start and stop the container.
Install and Configure Docker Compose for Ubuntu. This guide assumes, that Docker is already installed in your system.
Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. We can use Compose to create and start all services with one command from a single configuration YAML file.
It is a great tool to have a minimal orchestration of Docker containers, without adding the complexity that other tools have, like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm.