Installing Libravatar on NixOS Latest

Introduction

Libravatar is a service that provides a free and open-source distributed avatar hosting service. It provides an email-based avatar mapping to provide users with a consistent avatar across different websites. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Libravatar on NixOS Latest.

Prerequisites

Before we get started with the installation of Libravatar, there are a few things we need to have in place. These include:

• A running instance of NixOS Latest
• Basic knowledge of Linux commands
• A user account with sudo privileges

Step 1: Install Required Packages

The first step is to install the required packages for hosting Libravatar. We can do this by adding the following code snippet to the environment.systemPackages in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file.

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  libravatar
  mariadb
  mariadb-clients
  ];

After adding the code snippet to the file, we need to run sudo nixos-rebuild switch to update the system environment.

Step 2: Configure MariaDB Database

Libravatar requires a database to store its data. We will use MariaDB for this purpose. The first step is to create a database and user for Libravatar. We can do this using the following commands:

$ sudo mysql -u root
> CREATE DATABASE libravatar;
> CREATE USER 'libravatar'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword';
> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON libravatar.* TO 'libravatar'@'localhost';
> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
> exit

Next, we need to update the /etc/libravatar.conf file with database details:

[database]
database = libravatar
user = libravatar
password = yourpassword

Step 3: Create Domains and Configure DNS

The next step is to configure DNS records for Libravatar. We will create two subdomains, www and lbv, for Libravatar. We also need to create an A record pointing to the IP address of our server. We can do this by adding the following code snippet to the networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts section in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 80 443 ];
networking.firewall.enable = true;
networking.firewall.allowPing = true;

networking.hostName = "your_domain_name.tld";

networking.firewall.extraCommands = ''
  firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=http --permanent
  firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=https --permanent
  firewall-cmd --reload
'';

Step 4: Configure Nginx

Next, we need to configure Nginx as a reverse proxy for Libravatar. We can do this by adding the following code snippet to the /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file:

nginx = {
  domain = "your_domain_name.tld";
  enable = true;
  forceSSL = true;
  httpConfig = ''
    server {
      listen 80;
      server_name www.${nginx.domain};

      return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
    }

    server {
      listen 80;
      server_name lbv.${nginx.domain};

      location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:5000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      }
    }
  '';
};

After adding the code snippet to the file, we need to run sudo nixos-rebuild switch to update the system environment.

Step 5: Start Libravatar Service

Finally, we can start the Libravatar service using the following command:

$ sudo systemctl start libravatar

We can verify that the service is running by checking its status:

$ sudo systemctl status libravatar

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have learned how to install Libravatar on NixOS Latest. We installed the required packages, configured MariaDB database, created domains and added DNS records. We also configured Nginx as a reverse proxy and started the Libravatar service. With Libravatar up and running, users can now have a consistent avatar across different websites.

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