Is there a detailed guide which explains how to host a website on your own server on linux.
I have currently hosted it on one of the commerical web-hosts.
Also the domain is registered to a different vendor.
Thanks
This guide is probably more info than you really requested, but webserver information is in there. It's Gentoo-specific, but you can apply the same information with minor translations to any other distro.
I would look into installing apache
99% of linux distributions will have a package for it.
On ubuntu you can run:
sudo apt-get install apache2
Are you considering hosting a web page locally for the internet? Or is this just for development etc..
If it's for an internet server, you will need a stable internet connection with a good upstream.
You may also need a static IP address so you can setup DNS to point to the right place.
While I don't have an url to a good tutorial in english, I would just warn you that this is not something you should take lightly. Administrating a server involves getting your hands dirty in linux stuff and dealing with security can be pretty complex depending on your knowledge and requirements.
So if you know nothing about it, you should be very careful and if the website you host has is of any commercial importance you are probably better off hiring a server admin.
Just to point out; if this is a personal (home) server, as opposed to one in a corporate environment, then it's better not to bother hosting it - you won't necessarily have the bandwidth, and your ISP may not allow it.
As mentioned above, you will also need a static IP address, and you'll need to set up DNS records to point to the correct location, which your domain vendor may or may not help you with.
I think it depends on how familiar you are with linux. Certainly, many people do this for hobbyist websites.
There are many aspects involved - you should begin with something simple like getting apache running and visible to the outside world.
Related
Guys I really want to know how to hide my IP Address. And know why is it necessary to hide it?
I tried using anonymox, but I want to hide it without using any third party software.
You could try the methods listed here : https://pc4u.org/windows-10-how-to-connect-to-a-free-vpn-without-going-through-third-party-software/ if you don't want to use a third party software to hide your IP Address. You need to setup a VPN in your computer to achieve that. This will tunnel your network connection.
Source: pc4u.org
The only way to accomplish this without 3rd party software would be to use an online proxy and configure your browser to use said proxy. This will only change your IP as it appears to sites you visit through the browser and not other services you may be using on your computer.
The "best" way to "hide" or change your IP is to use a VPN (which you'll need software for). You can purchase a VPN service from one of Many providers. Some of the providers have their own apps that you can use, or, you can manually configure your own OpenVPN client. There are also many great scripts out there, AWS one-click servers, and cheap VPS providers that make it easier than ever to create your own VPN server. This might be over the "average" users head though...
The benefit of using a VPN is that it not only changes your IP, also encrypt your traffic.
It should be noted that VPN's are not 100% fool-proof. If not configured properly, you will expose your real IP. In addition, many VPN providers are not reputable.
The best recommendation I can make on this and every other topic on online privacy is this site here:
https://privacytools.io
This is (IMO) the best, most comprehensive source of information about protecting your privacy online. They will guide you in the right direction regarding VPN's, proxies, securing your browser, and much, much more. Check it out. Seriously...
OpenVPN has builds for all operating systems. https://openvpn.net
Like i said though, you'll have to purchase access (or if you're brave, find a free 'solution') from a provider and then configure OpenVPN to use your purchased credentials. This is usually about 5$ a month (for the solid / no logs / unlimited bandwidth ones ). There are many, many posts about setting up OpenVPN here on stackoverflow.
Finally, as far as the proxies go, again, you can purchase access to some of the reputable ones or search for a free one - though, in my experience the free proxies are very touch and go.
I currently have a website where I need to use node.js, I am not able to use node.js however, because the web host does not support it. What is the best way I go about hosting a server without having to completely change hosts?
[…] without having to completely change hosts?
If your current hosting provider doesn't support nodejs and you want to use nodejs, then you have to change hosting provider. Sorry.
I can recommend Google Cloud Engine. You can create a virtual machine, e.g. running Fedora, access it via SSH and install what you need, i.e. apache2, nodejs, etc.
If you're not comfortable with that, you should go for a managed hosting solution instead. It will probably be a little more expensive, and you'll have less flexibility in what programs you can use (since you share your virtual machine with other customers and can't make changes to the system yourself), but on the upside, most of the setup is done for you. There are many providers you can choose from; google "managed hostinig with nodejs" if you want an overview. I have used 1and1 before and was mostly happy with it. As you can see here, they have nodejs installed on their servers.
Your question makes hardly any sense... but
Heroku is really great for Node.js app hosting
I've been reading up on a few node tutorials but there are a couple of best/common practices that I would like to ask about for those out there that have built real node apps before.
Who do you run the node application as on your linux box? None of the tutorials I've read mention anything about adding a node user and group so I'm curious if it's because they just neglect to mention it or because they do something else.
Where do you keep your projects? '/home/'? '/var/'?
Do you typically put something in front of your node app? Such as nginx or haproxy?
Do you run other resources, such as storage(redis, mongo, mysql, ...), mq, etc..., on the same machine or separate machines?
I am guessing this question is mostly about setting up your online server and not your local development machine.
In the irc channel somebody answered the same question and said that he uses a separate user for each application. So I am guessing that this is a good common practice.
I mostly do /home/user/apps
I see a lot of nginx examples so I am guessing that is what most people use. I have a server with varnish in front of the a node.js application and that works well and was easy to setup. There are some pure node.js solutions but for something as important as your reversed proxy I would go for something that is a little more battle-tested.
To answer this correctly you probably have to ask your self. What are my resources? Can I afford many small servers? How important is your application? Will you lose money if your app goes down?
If you run a full stack on lets say one VPS then if there is a problem with that VPS then only one of your apps is affected.
In terms of maintenance having for example one database server for multiple apps might seem attractive. You could reason that if you need to update your database to patch a security hole you only need to do it in one place. On the other hand you now have a single point of failure for all the apps depending on that database server.
I personally went for many full stack server and I am learning how to automate deployment and maintenance. Tools like Puppet and Chef seem to be really helpful for this.
I only owned my own Linux servers for the last 3 months and have been a Linux user for 1.5 years. So before setting up a server park based on these answers make sure you do some additional research.
Here's what I think:
Using separate user for each app is the way I'm doing this.
I keep it in /home/user/ to make sure that only user (and root of course) has access to the app.
Some time ago I've created my own reverse proxy in Node JS based on node-http-proxy module. If you don't want to use reverse proxy then there's no point in putting anything in front of Node. There's even more: it may harm the app, since for example nginx can't use HTTP/1.1 (at least at the moment).
All resources I run on the same machine. Only when I actually need to distribute my app between separate machines I start thinking about seperate machines. There's no need to preoptimize. App's code is a different thing, though.
Visit the following links::
nettuts
nodetuts
lynda nodejs tutorials
Best practice seems to be to use the same user/group as you would for Apache or a similar web server.
On Debian, that is www-data:www-data
However, that can be problematic with some applications that might require higher permissions. For example, I've been trying to write something similar to Webmin using Node and this requires root permissions (or at least adm group) for a number of tasks.
On Debian, I use /var/nodejs (I use /var/www for "normal" web applications such as PHP)
One of the reasons I'm still reluctant to use Node (apart from the appalling lack of good quality documentation) is the need to assign multiple IP Ports when running multiple applications. I think that for any reasonably sized production environment you would use virtual servers to partition out the Node server processes.
One thing that Node developers seem to often forget is that, in many enterprise environments, IP ports are very tightly controlled. Getting a new port opened through the firewall is a very painful and time-consuming task.
The other thing to remember if you are using a reverse proxy is that web apps often fail when run from behind a proxy - especially if mapping a virtual folder (e.g. https://extdomain/folder -> http://localhost:1234), you need to keep testing.
I'm just running a single VPS for my own systems. However, for a production app, you would need to understand the requirements. Production apps would be very likely to need multiple servers if only for resilience and scalability.
Every LAMP or XAMPP writeup or tutorial I see says "Not for production use", so what do I use for production?
you use apache, php and mysql installed as they should be for production. xampp is all those things in one package with basically no set up security .. root passwords are empty .. users are well known .. but the components are the same as the ones you would use if you downloaded them each ..
The XAMPP philosophy says:
The philosophy behind XAMPP is to build an easy to install distribution for developers to get into the world of Apache. To make it convenient for developers XAMPP is configured with all features turned on.
The default configuration is not good from a securtiy point of view and it's not secure enough for a production environment - please don't use XAMPP in such environment.
So it’s primarily designated as a development environment and not as a production environment.
Given the right installation options, you can use them as a starting point for a production server. But there are some holes to fill in, mainly wrt security. The disclaimers you refer to are (wisely) to make sure you are wary and suspicious of what you start with (and also make sure no one can claim they supplied you with something dangerous without letting you know, so don't blame them if Bad Things happen.)
It's like selling you a car without seatbelts.
But what you learn, and the solutions you develop, are generally fully compatible with a "real" server.
XAMPP installation is easy as compared to LAMP. If you are on development server it makes no difference, but if you are on production server than it is good to do from basic instead of relying on 3rd party and you will get exact services you want on your production server, no extra services which can lower down your production server performance.
And try to keep same setup on development and production server, it will make sure that if application is running on development server will also run on production without doing any extra settings.
For production you've make your own configuration, it depends on visitors count, RAM installed on your server, scripts you're using. F.E. You need only 5 PHP extensions for Wordpress, but if you're using Woocommerce you need more PHP memory, for multiple sites you've use VirtualHosts, and if you have not domains registered also user UserDir modules.
All I've said is only examples, you must know your script requirements, install everything is not good idea.
I want to check a particular website from various locations. For example, I see a site example.com from the US and it works fine. The colleague in Europe says he cannot see the site (gets a dns eror).
Is there any way I can check that for my self instead of asking him every time?
This is a bit of self promotion, but I built a tool to do just this that you might find useful, called GeoPeeker.
It remotely accesses a site from servers spread around the world, renders the page with webkit and sends back an image. It will also report the IP address and DNS information of the site as it appears from that location.
There are no ads, and it's very stream-lined to serve this one purpose. It's still in development, and feedback is welcome. Here's hoping somebody besides myself finds it useful!
Sometimes a website doesn't work on my PC and I want to know if it's the website or a problem local to me(e.g. my ISP, my router, etc).
The simplest way to check a website and avoid using your local network resources(and thus avoid any problems caused by them) is using a web proxy such as Proxy.org.
Well, DNS should be the same worldwide, wouldn't it? Of course it can take up to a day or so until your new DNS record is propagated around the world. So either something is wrong on your colleague's end or the DNS record still takes some time...
I usually use online DNS lookup tools for that, e.g. http://network-tools.com/
It can check your HTTP header as well. Only a proxy located in Europe would be better.
Besides using multiple proxies or proxy-networks, you might want to try the planet-lab. (And probably there are other similar institutions around).
The social solution would be to post a question on some board that you are searching for volunteers that proxy your requests. (They only have to allow for one destination in their proxy config thus the danger of becoming spam-whores is relatively low.) You should prepare credentials that ensure your partners of the authenticity of the claim that the destination is indeed your computer.
DNS info is cached at many places. If you have a server in Europe you may want to try to proxy through it
It depends on wether the locatoin is detected by different DNS resolution from different locations, or by IP address that you are browsing from.
If its by DNS, you could just modify your hosts file to point at the server used in europe. Get your friend to ping the address, to see if its different from the one yours resolves to.
To browse from a different IP address:
You can rent a VPS server. You can use putty / SSH to act as a proxy. I use this from time to time to brows from the US using a VPS server I rent in the US.
Having an account on a remote host may or may not be enough. Sadly, my dreamhost account, even though I have ssh access, does not allow proxying.
The only thing that springs to mind for this is to use a proxy server based in Europe. Either have your colleague set one up [if possible] or find a free proxy. A quick Google search came up with http://www.anonymousinet.com/ as the top result.