nginx | PantherX Operating System Wiki

Configure Nginx with a self-signed certificate

su - root

Create a certificate

Be aware: If you want to publish this, you will need to get a certificate issues by an authority such as Lets Encrypt (free). Self-signed certificates will produce warnings in almost all browsers. (More on that at the bottom).

Create a self-signed certificate:

openssl req -newkey rsa:4096 \
            -x509 \
            -sha256 \
            -days 3650 \
            -nodes \
            -out ~/example.crt \
            -keyout ~/example.key

Create a website

Create a folder to hold the files:

mkdir -p /src/http/example.com

Now either move your static website there, or start one now.

Create an index.html file

nano /src/http/example.com/index.html

with the following content (example from bulma.io).

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <title>Hello Bulma!</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bulma@0.9.3/css/bulma.min.css">
  </head>
  <body>
  <section class="section">
    <div class="container">
      <h1 class="title">
        Hello World
      </h1>
      <p class="subtitle">
        My first website with <strong>Bulma</strong>!
      </p>
    </div>
  </section>
  </body>
</html>

Configure Nginx

To configure this, you will need to do two things:

Import the web package and service module.
Add the nginx-service-type to your services

Open nano /etc/system.scm to get started:

(use-modules (gnu)
             (gnu system)
             (px system)
             ...
             ;; Add this line
             (gnu packages web))

;; Add this line
;; If 'user-service-modules' already exists, just add 'web' to it
(use-service-modules web)

(px-desktop-os
 (operating-system

  ...

))

Modify services to look like this:

(services (cons* (service nginx-service-type
                                (nginx-configuration
                                 (server-blocks
                                  (list (nginx-server-configuration
                                    (server-name '("example.com"))
                                    (root "/src/http/example.com")
                                    (ssl-certificate "/root/example.crt")
                                    (ssl-certificate-key "/root/example.key"))))))
                %px-desktop-services))

Modify hosts file

To actually test this locally, we need to also modify the hosts file and add 127.0.0.1 example.com. We also do this in /etc/system.scm:

...
(px-desktop-os
 (operating-system
  (host-name "panther")
  (timezone "Europe/Berlin")
  (locale "en_US.utf8")

  ;; Add these lines
  (hosts-file
   (plain-file "hosts"
               "
127.0.0.1 localhost panther
::1       localhost panther
127.0.0.1 example.com"))

...
))

After reconfiguration, we can test.

guix system reconfigure /etc/system.scm

Testing

Just open https://example.com/ in Firefox, skip the certificate warning and you should see the content of your index.html file.

Automatically get certificates (Lets Encrypt)

If you wanted to actually share this with others, power up a server and use proper certificates; Here’s how-to get these automatically: Certificate Services - guix.gnu.org.

Clean-up

Remove the certificate, key and website /src/http/example.com/
Revert changes in /etc/config.scm
Reconfigure

guix system reconfigure /etc/system.scm