ask.systems/daemon

daemon is a web server system made of separate processes focused on a reverse proxy server that is configured automatically over RPC (or one line of config for pre-existing servers). It also has a launcher program that can run your (go) servers in a minimal chroot under a separated user.

It's especially good if you want to write go servers and share one URL between them easily with automatic TLS support.

Features

• 🔀 Run many backend web servers and securely share a single TLS protected domain name (via reverse proxy)
• 🧑‍💻 Read the logs of each server streaming real time to the dashboard which also lets you reload the config file and restart servers
• 🔛 Launch backend servers isolated in a minimal chroot as unprivileged users, configured in a simple textproto file
• 🤖 Backends automatically register their paths on the domain via gRPC (there's also support for servers that can't send the RPCs) and receive a port assignment and get their TLS certificate signed by the portal Certificate Authority
• 📚 There's a client library to do all this in one function call, and a tools library full of helpful functions for writing a go webserver
• 👾 Install as one binary that runs each server, or as individual binaries

Programs

• spawn a launcher program that runs processes isolated in a chroot as unprivileged users configured with textproto (which supports comments!)
  • Gives access to root owned TLS certs and ports without running other servers as root
  • Runs the dashboard to restart the processes or view logs
• portal, the reverse proxy, sets up the forwarding rules via gRPC dynamically instead of a using a static config file
  • So you can run a development server and have it register a temporary path without needing access to your TLS certificate
  • It works over the internet too (everything is TLS encrypted), so you can put many servers behind one URL without needing to configure all of the backends centrally
• host a simple static website or file server that supports password protection
• assimilate which registers with portal on behalf of third-party servers that don't know about daemon (as in: open source tools with a web UI, or raw TCP services you need to wrap in TLS encryption)

Quick Start

Test it out with no setup

Make sure you have go installed then

1. Install it with go install ask.systems/daemon@latest
   • This will leave the binary at ~/go/bin/daemon by default
   • I like to configure my $GOPATH/bin to be in my $PATH
2. Run daemon spawn (or use ~/go/bin/daemon if it isn't in your $PATH)
   • This will run spawn which will print logs and write an example config.pbtxt in the current directory
   • It will run portal and the dashboard, prompt for a dashboard login password, and then print the address of the dashboard at the end.
   • Note: since this doesn't include getting an officially recognized TLS certificate, portal will generate a new self-signed certificate which you will have to accept warnings about in your browser.

You can then edit the config file which has comments about how it works. You can add an instance of host to try out hosting a static website (there's an example in the file commented out).

Setting it up to keep it

Note: while daemon runs on most operating systems, the latest versions of macOS, and all versions of Windows do not support chroots. Windows also doesn't support changing the user.

So if you're not using Linux or BSD you will need to make some adjustments to your config.

See Operating Systems Support

1. You need to run spawn as root

This is so that it can access the TLS certs, open port 80, and run the other servers as less privileged users in a chroot. The easiest way to set it up so that you can quickly update daemon is to install with:

sudo go install ask.systems/daemon@latest

This will run the go compiler as root and download from the official goproxy server but I think it's trustworthy. If you prefer you can just copy the binary to a root owned place after installing it with non-root.

2. Setup the spawn config

In the example config delete the test portal config and uncomment the one that's meant for ports 80 & 443

You can print the example config with daemon spawn -example_config. Spawn also will create the file if you run it with no arguments (and run portal too).

You should make the config.pbtxt only accessible to root, because anyone who can write it can run arbitrary binaries as any user, also you might have API keys in it so you probably don't want people reading it either.

You will also need to add any new users to your system. It's best to set up a home dir for the user because daemon uses it to store save files or files to host by default. I recommend making a dedicated user for portal in particular, but you can use the usually-existing www user for host and assimilate, or you can make new users for each server. It's best to keep servers isolated so they can't access each others files in case one has a vulnerability or bug, especially with servers you download.

3. Setup a https://letsencrypt.org/ TLS certificate for your domain name

With your domain registrar, configure your DNS A/AAAA records to point at the IP of the computer running portal (consider if you need a dynamic DNS setup if at home).

Then install the letsencrypt tool certbot. If you don't have portal running you can use: sudo certbot certonly --standalone -d <domain> to register the certificate for the first time. Certbot will make your certificate only readable by root and you should leave it that way and leave it in the path certbot puts it in.

To setup auto-renewing I prefer to use cron (but you can use systemd timers or whatever else) to run the following script weekly:

certbot certonly -n --webroot -w /home/portal/cert-challenge/ -d <domain>
killall -SIGUSR1 {spawn,portal}

This renews using the webroot method where certbot puts a file in a directory owned by portal to verify the domain. This path assumes you have portal setup to run under the dedicated user named portal. The killall line sends the SIGUSR1 signal to both binaries to notify them that you have renewed the certificate so they can refresh the files with no downtime.

If you have multiple domains pointing to the same server you can just run certbot multiple times in the script and you only need to send the SIGUSR1 once to refresh all certificates.

4. Set it up to run at boot with your favorite init service

I think @reboot daemon spawn -dashboard_logins admin:<hash> > /dev/null in your sudo crontab -e is good enough but you can run it with systemd or whatever else if you like.

Check out the flags for spawn with daemon spawn -help so you can configure the location of the config file (the default is the working directory), etc if needed.

5. Firewall and syslog

If you're hosting at home you need to configure port forwarding on your router for port 80 and port 443 to the machine running portal. Also you need to make sure your server machine's firewall settings allow public access to those ports.

portal listens on port 2048 for the RPC server to register paths. There's an authorization token and portal RPCs use TLS, so it is safe to leave open to the public if you want to run servers behind multiple IPs all routed through the same portal server. Otherwise it might be nice to prevent non-local connections to 2048. Portal also assigns backend clients ports in the range 2049-4096 so it would be good to prevent external access to those ports, since they should only be accessed via portal. Also don't run non-portal clients on those ports, or portal may assign a conflicting port.

Look into setting up syslog. all the daemon binaries support (command line argument) and most server operating systems come with a service that supports the protocol (systemd does) which saves all the logs in one place and supports automatic log rotation. Since spawn runs binaries in chroot the best way to do it is to set up the network syslogging protocol and allow only local connections. daemon uses the user syslog facility since usually that is kept unused but you can configure syslog to move it to it's own file.

Installing a single binary

If you want to deploy only specific daemon binaries instead of the combined package you can install any of them like:

go install ask.systems/daemon/host@latest

Tip: The portal client library reads the PORTAL_ADDR and PORTAL_TOKEN environment variables automatically. So if you set those up in your shell dotfiles you can just run daemon binaries or go servers you wrote yourself with no other setup. That way it will automatically serve on your domain name with TLS publicly and internally, even if you're on a completely different network from your portal machine.

Operating Systems Support

Linux and BSD

All features of daemon work on Linux and BSD-based operating systems.

macOS

Everything works before v11.0.1, which is when they started to use the dynamic linker cache, which prevents us from building a working chroot environment (also SIP would prevent using the libraries even if we could extract them from the cache). Additionally it's not possible to statically link the system libraries in macOS. I believe as of Big Sur it is not reasonably possible to create a chroot in macOS.

So you will have to use the no_chroot: true config setting on all commands in newer versions.

Windows

In windows chroot doesn't exist. Additionally I believe there's no way using the go process API to change to a less privileged user as we start a process.

There are also no signals sent to processes in Windows, so to renew the TLS certificate we can't use that killall command in the script. Luckily, there is also no root user in windows so when you run certbot the files will be accessible by any process you run. So, you can just have portal open the files directly using the -tls_cert and -tls_key flags, portal will reopen the files automatically 1 hour before expiration.

So the config changes you need to make are:

1. Use the no_chroot: true option on all commands
2. Do not set the user: "username" field on any command
3. For the permanent portal config, instead of using the files field in the command to configure your TLS cert paths, use the -tls_cert and -tls_key args. Also there's no reason to use the ports field on windows, you can just use the default values for the port flags (so delete that line).
4. In textproto syntax any \ characters need to be escaped so windows paths will look like "-tls_cert=C:\\Certbot\\..."