Oops, Bye Bye

I recently created a discord bot for a personal use written in Python. Due to the version of python hosted on the server I had some issues. Decided to fiddle a little too much and we’ve ended up with a dead web server. Turns out Ubuntu is very much dependant on python and you should proceed with caution 🙂

All Good, any I had to start from scratch as naively I had no backups but it’s all a learning process.

Anyway, these are the steps I took to recreate the webserver.

ssh in as root
adduser user (replace user with your username)
usermod -aG sudo user

Logout

From Terminal from your own machine run the following commands (replace id_rsa with actual path, user and host:

ssh-key
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@host "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys && chmod -R go= ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Disable root Login

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

PermitRootLogin no
sudo systemctl restart ssh

My VPS comes with a pre configured user that I don’t want

sudo deluser ubuntu

Firewall Setup

sudo apt install ufw
sudo ufw status (Check If it's running, enable it isn't)
sudo ufw enable

As we’re running a web server

sudo ufw allow http
sudo ufw allow https

SSH Access (You don’t want to lose the ability to connect to your server!)

sudo ufw allow OpenSSH
sudo ufw allow 22

Installing web server, we’ll be using docker and docker compose, uninstall all conflicting packages

for pkg in docker.io docker-doc docker-compose docker-compose-v2 podman-docker containerd runc; do sudo apt-get remove $pkg; done

Add Docker’s official GPG key:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc

Add the repository to Apt sources:

echo \
"deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

Install latest Docker package

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

Verify the installation

sudo docker run hello-world

Docker Compose Install (We’re using linuxserver.io Webserver Swag)

sudo apt install docker-compose

Verify Installation

docker compose --version

Configure linuxserver.io and compose

sudo groupadd docker
add user to docker group
sudo usermod -aG docker user

Logout and log back in and make directories

sudo mkdir /opt/webserver_swag
sudo chown mike:mike /opt/webserver_swag

Note down user id

id

Create yaml file either on Server or SCP the file over, this will go in /opt/webserver_swag Example config, replace PUID and PGID with the id’s you noted down and create a password, for MYSQL and fill in URL.

version: "2"
services:

  mariadb:
    image: linuxserver/mariadb
    container_name: mariadb
    environment:
      - PUID=1001
      - PGID=1001
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password
      - TZ=Europe/London
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=WP_database
      - MYSQL_USER=WP_dbuser
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=password
    volumes:
      - /opt/webserver_swag/config/mariadb:/config
    restart: unless-stopped

  swag:
    image: linuxserver/swag
    container_name: swag
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    environment:
      - PUID=id
      - PGID=id
      - TZ=Europe/London
      - URL=URL
      - SUBDOMAINS=www
      - VALIDATION=http
    volumes:
      - /opt/webserver_swag/config:/config
    ports:
      - 443:443
      - 80:80 #optional
    depends_on:
      - mariadb
    restart: unless-stopped

I’m using WordPress so I’m going to install that.

wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xvf latest.tar.gz -C /opt/webserver_swag/config/www/
rm latest.tar.gz

Change root directory of compose file

cd /opt/webserver_swag/config/nginx/site_confs
nano default.conf

change root to /config/www/wordpress;

Save and Exit

docker compose up -d --force-recreate

Navigate to site and follow the prompts

From the start to finish with researching etc. This process took about an hour, if I had this, I would have saved a lot of time.

Some useful resources I used along the way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GTYB8RVYBc
https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/