Linux Server Configuration Project

These are the steps taken to deploy the Music Inventory app which was done as part of the Udacity Full-Stack NanoDegree program.

The website is running on a Apache2 server with mod_wsgi.

The app can be found at www.danisantoscode.com

To add instruments to the database, please login to Google.

The steps taken in order to achieve so were as follows:

AWS Lightsail Instance

Created a Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instance with the following Public IP: 35.183.93.70

Made the IP static to set up the domain name later ahead. (15.222.159.43)

Under the Networking panel, added rules to the firewall:

Application Protocol Port range
SSH          TCP      22
HTTP         TCP      80
Custom       TCP      123
Custom       TCP      2200

Ubuntu setup

Run the following, to make sure packages, especially security ones, are updated:

• sudo apt-get update

• sudo apt-get upgrade

Set the hostname on the host file

• sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add the following lines to the file:

127.0.0.1 localhost
15.222.159.43 www.danisantoscode.com

(I created a domain name on Google. More info below)

Disable ssh with root

By default, Lighsail won't allow remote access via root

Create user grader

[DEPRECATED] sudo adduser grader

Add Grader to sudo group

[DEPRECATED] sudo adduser grader sudo

Generate SSH keys for Grader and add to server

[DEPRECATED]

• This prevents brute force attacks

• Generate ssh-keys for grader with passphrase ssh-keygen

• Generated two keys (one public, one private)

• Add grader public key to server: cd /home/grader sudo mkdir .ssh sudo touch .ssh/authorized_keys sudo nano .ssh/authorized_keys

• Added public key (graderAccess.pub) to authorized keys file on the Server

• You can now log in as grader by running: ssh grader@35.156.207.226 -p 2200 -i ~/.ssh/graderAccess (The key and the passphrase are in the provided "Notes to Reviewer")

Notice: - You might have to run chmod 400 graderAccess in order to make it secure, since Amazon Lighsail might raise the following error message: WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!

Disallow Remote Access via root

Change SSHD Config file to disable remote access with root and enable port 2200:

• sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

• PermitRootLogin no

• PasswordAuthentication no

• #Run SSH on a non standard port Port 2200

• sudo service sshd restart

Ubuntu Firewall

• Make sure UFW is installed. (It is isntalled by default on Lightsail)

• sudo ufw reset

• sudo ufw disable

• sudo ufw default deny incoming

• sudo ufw default allow outgoing

• sudo ufw allow 2200/tcp

• sudo ufw allow 80/tcp

• sudo ufw allow 123/tcp

To enable the firewall:

sudo ufw enable

sudo ufw status will return:

Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
2200/tcp                   ALLOW       Anywhere
80/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
123/tcp                    ALLOW       Anywhere
2200/tcp (v6)              ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
80/tcp (v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
123/tcp (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

WSGI and Apache setup

• Install apache: sudo apt-get install apache2

• Install mod_wsgi: sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi

• To enable mod_wsgi: sudo a2enmod wsgi

• Create a music_inventory.conf file to Apache by running: sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/music_inventory.conf (See the conf file on this repo (music_inventory.conf)

• Then activate this conf file by running: sudo a2ensite music_inventory.conf

• Make sure the other conf files are disabled by running sudo a2dissite <NAME>

• After making those changes, run sudo service apache2 restart

Cloning the webapp project repo on Git

Install git:

• sudo apt-get install git

Cd into the following path:

sudo /var/www

• Clone the repo music_inventory repo under the wwww directory

• Create a wsgi file in that repo with app to be run on Mod WSGI's Virtual Host:

sudo touch music_inventory.wsgi

Note: You can see this file in the current repo!

Setting up the Environment and installing dependencies for the project to run

1. Install pip: sudo apt-get install python3-pip

2. sudo pip3 install virtualenv

3. Create env sudo virtualenv venv

4. Activate the env by running sudo source venv/bin/activate

5. To install dependencies, run pip3 install -r requirements.txt

PostgreSQL setup

• sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Upon installation, Postgres creates a Linux user called "postgres" which can be used to access the system. We can change to this user by typing:

sudo su - postgres

From here, we can connect to the system by typing:

psql

Create database catalog: CREATE DATABASE catalog;

The current default when installing PostgreSQL from the Ubuntu repositories is to not allow remote connections to the database, removing a potential attack vector.

(More on the topics can be found at https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-postgresql-on-an-ubuntu-vps)

Creating Roles and Granting Permissions on the Database

Create role catalogin database:

• psql followed by \password catalog

• user catalog has limited permissions

• Allow user to login:

ALTER ROLE "inventory_user" WITH LOGIN;

• Connect to the catalog database: \c catalog
• Grant limited powers to the user:

GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE catalog TO catalog;
GRANT SELECT ON instrument TO catalog;
GRANT INSERT ON instrument TO catalog;
GRANT UPDATE ON instrument TO catalog;
GRANT DELETE ON instrument TO catalog;

(https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/sql-grant.html) (https://tableplus.io/blog/2018/04/postgresql-how-to-create-read-only-user.html)

CHOWN and CHMOD

It's important to give file permissions to write, read and execute the following files:

Go to the /var/www directory and run sudo chown :www-data music_inventory sudo chmod 775 music_inventory

Then, go to /var/www/music_inventory and run: sudo chown :www-data catalog sudo chmod 775 catalog

Give permissions to the database file at /etc/postgresql/10: sudo chown :www-data main sudo chmod 775 main

Setting up the schema

Finally, to set up the schema and prepopulate the database, run the following:

python3 /var/www/music_inventory/catalog/database_setup.py

python3 /var/www/music_inventory/catalog/loadinstruments.py

DNS (Google Domains)

This DNS was created for another purpose, but I'm using it in this project. It's a Google domain.

I added the public IP of this AWS instance to the list of resource records.

OAuth Consent

I added my domain to the list of Google's OAuth authorized domains.