Installing Pomerium on NetBSD

Pomerium is an open-source tool that provides a secure way to access web applications over the internet. In this tutorial, we will go through the steps of installing Pomerium on NetBSD.

Prerequisites

Before we start with the installation, ensure that your system meets the following requirements:

• NetBSD 7.0 or later
• Root access to the system
• A terminal window or console

Step 1: Install Go

Pomerium is written in Go, so we need to have Go installed on our system. If Go is already installed, you can skip this step. Otherwise, follow the steps below to install Go:

1. Update the system package database:

   # pkgin update
   

2. Install the Go package:

   # pkgin install go
   

Step 2: Install Pomerium

Now that we have Go installed, we can proceed with installing Pomerium:

1. Download the latest Pomerium release from the official website:

   # fetch https://github.com/pomerium/pomerium/releases/latest/download/pomerium-netbsd-amd64
   

2. Move the downloaded binary to the /usr/local/bin directory:

   # mv pomerium-netbsd-amd64 /usr/local/bin/pomerium
   

3. Make the binary executable:

   # chmod +x /usr/local/bin/pomerium
   

Step 3: Configure Pomerium

After installing Pomerium, we need to create a configuration file to define which web applications we want to secure with Pomerium:

1. Create a directory for Pomerium's configuration file:

   # mkdir /usr/local/etc/pomerium
   

2. Create a configuration file named config.yaml inside the /usr/local/etc/pomerium directory:

   # touch /usr/local/etc/pomerium/config.yaml
   

3. Edit the configuration file with your preferred text editor and define the web applications you want to secure with Pomerium. Here is an example configuration file:

   proxies:
   - from: https://app.example.com
     to: http://localhost:8080
   

   In this example, we are securing an application running on http://localhost:8080 and making it accessible through https://app.example.com.

Step 4: Running Pomerium

Now that we have configured Pomerium, we can start the service:

# pomerium -config /usr/local/etc/pomerium/config.yaml

This command will start Pomerium with the configuration defined in the config.yaml file.

Step 5: Testing Pomerium

To test if Pomerium is correctly running and securing our web application, we can access it through the URL defined in the configuration file (https://app.example.com in our example). If everything is working, Pomerium should prompt us for authentication before granting access to the web application.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed and configured Pomerium on NetBSD.

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