These instructions are based on getting the software up and running from scratch on a Debian Buster (10.9, stable as of 2021-05-16) system.

In the end the installed packages were as per the files:

debian-vm-dpkg-selections.txt
debian-vm-dpkg_-l.txt

Base Debian Install

A simple Debian install was performed in a VirtualBox VM to ensure no confounding factors. Only the bare minimum was installed, and then the following packages also installed:

apt install screen sudo git

A specific user was created:

useradd -c 'EDDN Gateway' -m -s /bin/bash eddn

Further installation

As 'root'

Some additional Debian packages and python modules are required:

apt install python-pip virtualenv

You will need a mysql/mariab database:

apt install mariadb-server
mysqladmin create eddn
# Generate a secure password somehow, e.g.
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=512 count=1 | sha256sum
mysql mysql # Connect to the database as root
> CREATE USER IF NOT EXISTS 'eddn'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY ' SOME SECURE PASSWORD ';
> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on eddn.* TO 'eddn'@'localhost';
> \q

Netdata

In order to get host performance metrics (CPU, RAM and network usage) you will need to install netdata. On Debian-based systems:

apt install netdata

The default configuration should be all you need, listening on 127.0.0.1:19999.

LetsEncrypt

We assume that you're using a TLS certificate from LetsEncrypt, it's free!

It will be necessary to renew the TLS certificate using certbot, or some alternative ACME client. We'll assume certbot.

Install certbot

On a Debian system simply:

apt install certbot

Although this version might be a little old now, it does work.

LetsEncrypt TLS Certificates

If you are taking over hosting the EDDN relay then hopefully you have access to the existing certificate files.

So, first copy those into place:

cd /etc/letsencrypt
mkdir -p archive/eddn.edcd.io
mkdir -p live/eddn.edcd.io
cd archive/eddn.edcd.io
cp <source for all *.pem files> .
chmod 644 *.pem
chmod 600 privkey*.pem
cd ../../live/eddn.edcd.io
# NB: You need to check what the *newest* file is.  The `1` will be a
# greater number if the certificate has ever been renewed.
ln -s ../../archive/eddn.edcd.io/fullchain1.pem fullchain.pem
ln -s ../../archive/eddn.edcd.io/privkey1.pem privkey.pem

After this you need to ensure that the certificate stays renewed. With a Debian system using certbot:

There should already be a systemd timer set up:

systemctl status certbot.timer

If that doesn't show "; enabled;" in:

Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/certbot.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)

then:

systemctl enable certbot.timer

This will renew the certificate as necessary (i.e. when <= 30 days until it expires, or whatever current LetsEncrypt and certbot policy causes). But it will not ensure the files are in all the places you might need them to be.
Ensure the certificate files are deployed to where they're needed. When using the certbot timer the easiest thing to do is to utilise a script in /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/.

There are example files for this in contrib/letsencrypt/:
```
 mkdir -p /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy
 cp contrib/letsencrypt/deploy-changed-certs /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy
 mkdir -p /etc/scripts
 cp contrib/letsencrypt/certbot-common /etc/scripts/
```
Remember to edit them to suit your setup!

Network Configuration

There are multiple ports that you'll have to ensure are allowed through any firewall, and some of them also require being reverse proxied correctly.

The reverse proxies pertain to:

The port for the Gateway to receive uploads from senders (e.g. Elite Dangerous Market Connector). This is also used for the 'monitor' web page to obtain stats about messages passing through the Gateway.
A set of URLs for accessing netdata.

Necessary ports

These all for TCP, no UDP:

443 - a web server capable of reverse proxying set up for TLS on the public host name of the EDDN service. This is used to serve the schemas, the monitor web page, and to reverse proxy URLs beginning /netdata/ to the netdata service.
Default: 4430 - Gateway 'http' port, used both for EDDN senders to upload, and also for the Gateway message rate stats on the monitor web page.

But that's the public port. The Gateway process itself listens on 8081. So you'll need a reverse proxy listening on port 4430 and forwarding all requests to 127.0.0.1:8081.
Default: 9091 - Monitor 'http' port, used for the monitor web page to query schema and software statistics. No reverse proxy setup.
Default: 9500 - The port on the Relay that EDDN listeners connect to in order to receive the zeromq stream. No reverse proxy setup.
Default: 9090 - The Relay 'http' port for its portion of the message statistics on the monitor web page. No reverse proxy setup.

There's also the internal 8500 port, but that's literally only used for the Monitor and Relay to pick up zeromq messages forwarded from the Gateway, so all over localhost.

See Configuration for guidance on what override config settings can be used to change any of these ports.

Reverse Proxy with Apache

If you already have an Apache installation it will be easier to just use it for the reverse proxy.

Ensure you have these modules installed and active:

a2enmod proxy proxy_http

Apache configuration

There is an example VirtualHost configuration in contrib/apache-eddn.conf which makes the following assumptions:

The usual Apache default configuration is in place elsewhere.
The hostname being used - ServerName.
The location of the monitor files - DocumentRoot.
The location of the schema files - Alias /schemas/ ....
The location of the TLS certificate files - SSLCertificateFile and `SSLCertificateKeyFile.

You should be able to:

Copy contrib/apache-eddn.conf into /etc/apache/sites-available/ as an appropriate filename for the hostname you're using.
Edit to suit the local situation/setup. Remember to ensure the configured log directory exists.

Enable the site:

a2ensite <filename without trailing .conf>
apache2ctl configtest
# CHECK THE OUTPUT
apache2ctl graceful

Reverse Proxy with nginx

If you don't yet have nginx installed then start with:

apt install nginx-light

nginx configuration

There is an example configuration in contrib/nginx-eddn.conf which makes some assumptions:

That it will listen on the standard HTTP and HTTPS ports.
The hostname being used - server_name directives.
The location of the monitor files - root directive.
The location of the schema files - location directive.
The location of the TLS certificate files - ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key directives.

You should be able to:

Copy contrib/nginx-eddn.conf into /etc/nginx/sites-available/eddn.
Edit to suit the local situation/setup.

Enable the site:

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/eddn        
systemctl restart nginx.service

If you're already using another web server you'll need to duplicate at least the use of a TLS certificate and the Reverse Proxying as required.

In the 'eddn' account

Clone a copy of the application project from gitub

We'll assume you're setting up a development environment so use dev in the path and some other configuration. The scripts currently support three environments: live, beta and dev.

mkdir -p ${HOME}/dev
cd ${HOME}/dev
git clone https://github.com/EDCD/EDDN.git EDDN.git
cd EDDN.git

We'll assume this ${HOME}/dev/EDDN.git path elsewhere in this document.

Set up a python virtual environment

So as to not have any python package version requirements clash with anything else it's best to use a Python virtual environment (venv). You will have installed the Debian package 'virtualenv' above for this purpose.

We'll put the venv in ${HOME}/dev/python2.7-venv with the following command:

cd ${HOME}/dev
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 ${HOME}/dev/python2.7-venv

And for future ease of changing python versions:

ln -s python2.7-venv python-venv

And now start using this venv:

. python-venv/bin/activate

Ensure necessary python modules are installed

Installing extra necessary python modules is simple:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Initialise Database Schema

You will need to get the database schema in place:

mysql -p eddn < ${HOME}/eddn/dev/EDDN/schema.sql
<the password you set in the "CREATE USER" statement above>

Ref: As root.

Concepts

There are three components to this application.

Gateway - this is where senders connect to upload messages. It performs schema validation and then passes the messages on to both the Monitor and the Relay (they connect and perform zeromq subscription). This requires port 4430 to make it past any firewall, NAT etc and to the Gateway process. However, the actual Gateway process listens on port 8081 and the reverse proxy setup forwards port 4430 traffic to this.
Monitor - this gathers statistics about the messages, such as the sending software name and version. This requires port 9091 to make it past any firewall, NAT etc, and to the Monitor process.
Relay - this is where listeners connect in order to be sent messages that have passed the schema and duplicate checks. This requires ports 9500 and 9090 to make it past any firewall, NAT etc, and to the Relay process.

There also port 8500 which is used purely over localhost for the communication from the Gateway to the Relay and Monitor.

As the code currently (2021-05-16) stands it MUST run on a standalone host such that everything is served relative to the path root, not a path prefix.

See also the post-installation notes for some caveats about running this other than on the actual eddn.edcd.io host.

Configuration

Default application configuration is in the file src/eddn/conf/Settings.py. Do not change anything in this file, see below about overriding using another file.

You will need to obtain a TLS certificate from, e.g. LetsEncrypt. The application will need access to this and its private key file.

CERT_FILE = '/etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUROWN.eddn.edcd.io/fullchain.pem'
KEY_FILE  = '/etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUROWN.eddn.edcd.io/privkey.pem'

Network configuration
1. RELAY_HTTP_BIND_ADDRESS and RELAY_HTTP_PORT define the IP and port on which the Relay listens for, e.g. /stats/ requests.
2. RELAY_RECEIVER_BINDINGS defines where the Relay connects in order to subscribe to messages from the Gateway. Should match GATEWAY_SENDER_BINDINGS.
3. RELAY_SENDER_BINDINGS defines the address the application listens on for connections from listeners such as eddb.io.
4. RELAY_DUPLICATE_MAX_MINUTES how many minutes to keep messages hashes cached for so as to detect, and not Relay out, duplicate messages. If you set this to the literal string false the duplication checks will be disabled. This is very handy when testing the code.
5. GATEWAY_HTTP_BIND_ADDRESS and GATEWAY_HTTP_PORT define where the Gateway listens to for incoming messages from senders. Might be forwarded from nginx or other reverse proxy.
6. GATEWAY_SENDER_BINDINGS is where the Gateway listens for connections from the Relay and Monitor in order to send them messages that passed schema checks.
7. GATEWAY_JSON_SCHEMAS defines the schemas used for validation. Note that these are full public URLs which are served by your web server.
8. GATEWAY_OUTDATED_SCHEMAS any past schemas that are no longer valid.
9. MONITOR_HTTP_BIND_ADDRESS and MONITOR_HTTP_PORT define where the Monitor listens to for web connections, e.g. the statistics page.
10. MONITOR_RECEIVER_BINDINGS defines where the Monitor connects in order to subscribe to messages from the Gateway. Should match GATEWAY_SENDER_BINDINGS.
11. MONITOR_UA appears to be unused.
Database Configuration
1. MONITOR_DB - defines the necessary information for the application to connect to a mysql/mariadb database for storing stats.
  1. database - the name of the database
  2. user - the user to connect as
  3. password - the secure password you set above when installing and configuring mariadb/mysql.
It is assumed that the database is on localhost.

To change anything from the defaults create an override config file, which must be in valid JSON format (so no comments, no dangling commas etc). You can then pass this file to the application scripts, e.g.:

python Gateway.py --config some/other/configfile.json

You only need to define the settings that you need to change from defaults, e.g. certificate files and database credentials, without worrying about the basic setup.

There is an example of this in eddn-settings-overrides-EXAMPLE.json. It sets:

The TLS CERT and KEY files.
The gateway to listen on 0.0.0.0 rather than localhost (necessary when testing in a VM).
Configures the database connection and credentials.
Turns off the relay duplicate check.

Running

You have some choices for how to run the application components:

Running scripts from source

If you are just testing out code changes then you can choose to run this application directly from the source using the script systemd/start-eddn-service. You'll need to run it as, e.g.

systemd/start-eddn-service dev gateway --from-source

When using --from-source you can also supply a --background argument to put the process into the background with a .pid file written in the logs directory.

Check the systemd/eddn_<environment>_config files for the location of the logs directory.

Running from installation

Otherwise you will want to utilise the setup.py file to build and install the application files. You'll need to do some setup first as there are necessary files not checked into git, because they're per environment:

Performing the installation

Change directory to the top level of the git clone.
Create a file setup_env.py with contents:
```
EDDN_ENV="dev"
```
Replace dev with the environment you're setting up for.
As we're using a python venv we can now just run:

python setup.py install

to install it all. This will install a python egg into the python venv, and then also ensure that the monitor and schema files are in place, along with support scripts.

There is an example systemd setup in systemd that assumes this local installation.

There are also some SysV style init.d scripts in contrib/init.d/ for running the components. They will need the DAEMON lines tweaking for running from another location.

You should now have:

~/.local/bin - with some scripts and per-environment config files:
1. start-eddn-dev-service - script that runs a specified EDDN service. This is intended to be used by the contrib systemd setup, but will work standalone as well.
2. eddn-logs-archive - script that potentially archives and expires existing archival logs for the specified environment.
~/.local/share/eddn/dev - with the monitor and schema files, along with an example config override file if you didn't already have a config.json here.

Using systemd to run the live service

systemd/ contains two systemd unit files to enable starting the services via system, including at boot time.

systemd/eddn@.service - a systemd template unit file that can be used to start/stop any of the EDDN services in the live environment. You would invoke it like:

systemctl start eddn@eddn-gateway.service

systemd/eddn.target - a system target until file which will start all of:

eddn@eddn-relay.service
eddn@eddn-monitor.service
eddn@eddn-gateway.service

To get them working:

copy both files into /etc/systemd/system/.
Enable the target and services: 1. systemctl enable eddn.target 1. systemctl enable eddn@eddn-gateway.service 1. systemctl enable eddn@eddn-monitor.service 1. systemctl enable eddn@eddn-relay.service

Post-installation steps

If you're not using the live environment then there are some edits you need to make.

All of the contrib/monitor files have the hostname eddn.edcd.io hard-coded. You will need to perform search and replace on the installed/live files to use a test host. The files in question are:

monitor/js/eddn.js
monitor/schemas.html

Replace the string eddn.edcd.io with the hostname you're using. You'll need to perform similar substitutions if you change the configuration to use any different port numbers.

Accessing the Monitor

There is an EDDN Status web page usually provided at, e.g. https://eddn.edcd.io/. This is enabled by the Monitor component through the combination of the contrib/monitor/ files and API endpoints provided by the Monitor process itself.

You will need to configure a reverse proxy to actually enable access to this. There is an example nginx configuration in contrib/nginx-eddn.conf.

The necessary files should be put in place by

The 'monitor' files are what form the status/statistics page at https://eddn.edcd.io/, so they need to be installed somewhere in a static manner accessible to nginx.

Although setup.py installs the files you might still need to ensure the permissions are correct for your web server to access them.

chmod -R og+rX ${HOME} ${HOME}/.local ${HOME}/.local/share ${HOME}/.local/share/eddn
chmod -R og+rX ${HOME}/.local/share/eddn/schemas

Testing all of this in a VM

In order to test all of this in a VM you might need to set up a double proxying:

Internet -> existing server -> VM -> nginx -> EDDN scripts

If using Apache on a Debian server then you need some ProxyPass directives:

    <IfModule mod_proxy.c>
            SSLProxyEngine On
            SSLProxyVerify none
            ProxyPreserveHost On

            # Pass through 'gateway' upload URL to Debian VM
            ProxyPass "/eddn/upload/" "https://VM_HOST:8081/upload/"
            # Pass through 'monitor' URLs to Debian VM
            ProxyPass "/eddn/" "https://VM_HOST/"
    </IfModule>

This assumes you don't have a dedicated virtual host in this case, hence the "/eddn" prefix there. Remove that if you are using a dedicated virtual host on the 'existing server'.

You'll also need to redirect the Gateway and Relay ports using firewall rules. With iptables:

    PUB_INT=<your public facing interface>
    PRIV_INT=<internal interface if testing on internal network>
    ANYWHERE="0.0.0.0/0"  # Not strictly necessary, but it's good to be explicit
    # The IP your host/VM can be reached on.
    YOUR_EDDN_IP=...
    # Port 4430 is for senders to the Gateway
    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ${PUB_INT} -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 4430 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ${PRIV_INT} -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 4430 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 4430 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    # Port 9500 is for listeners connecting to the Relay
    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ${PUB_INT} -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9500 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ${PRIV_INT} -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9500 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9500 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    # Port 9090 is for the Relay web server, stats API
    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ${PUB_INT} -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9090 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ${PRIV_INT} -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9090 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9090 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    # Port 9091 is for the Monitor web server, stats API
    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ${PUB_INT} -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9091 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ${PRIV_INT} -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9091 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}
    iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp -s ${ANYWHERE} --dport 9091 -j DNAT --to-destination ${YOUR_EDDN_IP}

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Running-this-software.md

Running-this-software.md

Base Debian Install

Further installation

As 'root'

Netdata

LetsEncrypt

Install certbot

LetsEncrypt TLS Certificates

Network Configuration

Necessary ports

Reverse Proxy with Apache

Apache configuration

Reverse Proxy with nginx

nginx configuration

In the 'eddn' account

Clone a copy of the application project from gitub

Set up a python virtual environment

Ensure necessary python modules are installed

Initialise Database Schema

Concepts

Configuration

Running

Running scripts from source

Running from installation

Performing the installation

Using systemd to run the live service

Post-installation steps

Accessing the Monitor

Testing all of this in a VM

Files

Running-this-software.md

Latest commit

History

Running-this-software.md

File metadata and controls

Base Debian Install

Further installation

As 'root'

Netdata

LetsEncrypt

Install certbot

LetsEncrypt TLS Certificates

Network Configuration

Necessary ports

Reverse Proxy with Apache

Apache configuration

Reverse Proxy with nginx

nginx configuration

In the 'eddn' account

Clone a copy of the application project from gitub

Set up a python virtual environment

Ensure necessary python modules are installed

Initialise Database Schema

Concepts

Configuration

Running

Running scripts from source

Running from installation

Performing the installation

Using systemd to run the live service

Post-installation steps

Accessing the Monitor

Testing all of this in a VM