This repo automates setting up a Raspberry Pi as a hyper/https server. It uses Homebase to pin hyperdrves and NGINX to securely handle requests to Homebase's HTTP service. with the following basic features:

• Pin one hyperdrive with a HTTPS mirror.
• Pin as many hyperdrives as you need without HTTPS mirroring.

You should be able to modify the homebase role to enable more features.

Why only one HTTPS-mirrored hyperdrive?

Version 3 of Homebase has dropped the Letsencrypt feature. In its place I've used a combination of NGINX and Certbot.

Homebase listens for HTTP requests on port 8080 and NGINX acts as a reverse proxy, enabling HTTPS requests to be passed to Homebase. Homebase uses the host localhost and NGINX listens to localhost:8080; as there's only one localhost, only one hyperdrive can be mirrored to HTTPS.

I have a vague idea of what virtual hosts are. If you need this feature, please let me know or open a PR.

Instructions

Clone this repository.

git clone https://github.com/simoncrowe/ansible-raspberry-pi-hyperdrive-homebase-nginx.git
cd ansible-raspberry-pi-hyperdrive-homebase-nginx

To use any of these playbooks you will need Ansible installed. (You may wish to do this in a virtual environment.)

pip install ansible passlib

1. SSH Authentication Setup

1.1. Preparation

You'll need to install the sshpass package for this step to work.

If you haven't already generated ssh keys for your machine (not the Pi), you can do so with the ssh-keygen shell command.

You'll need an pi with a fresh Raspberry Pi OS (a.k.a. Raspbian) installation. The Lite version of the OS makes more sense for a server as it lacks a GUI.

Enable SSH on the pi. You should follow sectiuon 3 of this page for headless Raspberry Pi if you opted for Raspberry Pi OS Lite.

Power up your pi and ensure it's connected to your network. Ethernet is preferable; WiFi is also an option.

If you have only one pi connected to your network and the following command is successful, you can proceed to step 1.2.

ping raspberrypi.local

Successful output should look something like this:

64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=2.16 ms

If you do see something like the above, it may be worth replacing raspberrypi.local with pi's IP address (e.g. 192.168.1.3) to the file called hosts in the root directory of this repository. The hostname raspberrypi.local isn't that reliable and it could cause problems with Ansible later.

Unsuccessful output will look like this:

ping: unknown host raspberrypi.local

If you get this, your pi might not reachable on your network or only by its IP address. If you have more than one pi connected, you'll still need to find the IP address of the pi you want to set up.

One way to see if your pi is on your network is using nmap

If you don't have nmap installed, you should be able to get it via your system package manager. e.g. sudo apt install nmap

This command will thoroughly scan your local network and may take several minutes.

sudo nmap -A 192.168.1.1/24

If your pi is connected, its report should look something like this:

...
Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.3
Host is up (0.00091s latency).
Not shown: 999 closed ports
PORT   STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open  ssh     OpenSSH 7.9p1 Raspbian 10 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
|   2048 ba:88:1f:54:0f:61:10:34:98:f4:5c:f2:35:79:cd:4f (RSA)
|_  256 68:92:a4:8e:da:b3:65:89:23:a3:3d:49:9c:a9:ab:9f (ECDSA)
MAC Address: DC:A6:32:67:9F:6E (Unknown)
Device type: general purpose
Running: Linux 3.X|4.X
OS CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel:3 cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel:4
OS details: Linux 3.2 - 4.0
Network Distance: 1 hop
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel
...

The line 22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 7.9p1 Raspbian 10 (protocol 2.0) will only appear is your pi has SSH enabled. If you can't easily identify your pi, double-check that SSH has been enabled on it.

If you see more than one pi, you'll need to either temporally switch off your pi to work out which one it is, or find out its MAC address.

If your pi does turn out not to be accessible at raspberrypi.local, you'll need to put its IP address in the file called hosts in the root directory of this repository.

1.2. Automated setup

The next step is to run the Ansible playbook for setting up SSH authentication on your pi.

ansible-playbook auth-init.yaml -u pi --ask-pass

You'll prompted three things:

1. SSH password: the password of the default pi user on your pi. if you haven't changed this yet, it'll be raspberry.
2. The path to your public SSH key. If you don't know, it's probably the default, so hitting ENTER is fine.
3. The new password for the default pi user of your pi. It's a good idea to change this from the default, so let's automate it!

If the playbook runs to completion without errors, you will no longer be prompted for a password when opening an SSH session on your pi. E.g.

ssh [email protected]

You will, however, not be able to SSH into your pi using another machine with a different public key to the one you've run the playbook on. If you want to authenticate from other machines, you can set this up manually

2. Server Setup

If step 1 was successful, setting up Homebase should be simple.

2.1. Configuration

You'll need to create a file called private.yaml in the vars subdirectory of this repo and put the following YAML in it, replacing values as appropriate:

# The url used to update dynamic DNS record (in case your IP address changes)
dynamic_dns_update_url: https://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/update.php?sPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAMSPAM=

# The hyperdrive that you want to mirror over HTTPS
landing_page_hyper_url: hyper://c6bbbb7c3f292ddca9df3c6ebcdb9c21a66a3f0d3dad065cbfb0a59bb0098aa3/
# The domain name that you want to mirror the above hyperdrive on.
# This must have a DNS record pointing at your pi's IP address.
landing_page_https_domain: example.com
# The email address to use when verifying SSL certificates with Letsencrypt
letsencrypt_email: [email protected]

# Add any other hyper URLs you want to pin using Homebase in this list
hosted_hyper_urls:
  - hyper://bc9fc525239efd6e886a4b7d402ee800d1dd2812363f3be5161f0423fa46d3a3
  - hyper://c57ef9a28674ff072d293ac744a172a2aa4c975ea8ffeba964fed23fbca2ce77
# If you don't want to pin any, just specify an empty list like so:
# hosted_hyper_urls: []

2.2. Setup

First, install the third-party roles:

ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yaml

Second, run the main playbook:

ansible-playbook setup-hyper-server.yaml

If successful, the above command applies a number of Ansible roles listed in site.yaml to your pi, including basic security configuration. A consequence of this hardened security is that you will now be unable to SSH into your pi using a user's password. Passwordless login will still work, and you can manually add the public keys of other machines to your pi if needed.

3. Runnning Homebase

You'll need to SSH into your pi to start the Homebase service:

ssh pi@<hostname or IP address of pi>

You may be able to connect to the hostname raspberrypi.local. Failing at that you'll need to use the pi's IP address.

You can run Homebase as a background process (deamon) using pm2:

pm2 start homebase

Similarly, you can stop it using:

pm2 stop homebase

If your Hyperdrive doesn't get a new peer connected when you start homebase and/or you can't access the drive over HTTPS, try running in the foreground to see if there are any errors:

homebase