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gotosocial/docs/installation_guide/nginx.md

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Reverse proxy with NGINX

Requirements

For this you will need Certbot, the Certbot NGINX plugin and of course NGINX itself.

These are popular packages so your distro will probably have them.

Ubuntu

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx nginx

Arch

sudo pacman -S certbot certbot-nginx nginx

OpenSuse

sudo zypper install nginx python3-certbot python3-certbot-nginx

Configure GoToSocial

If GoToSocial is already running, stop it.

sudo systemctl stop gotosocial

Or if you don't have a systemd service just stop it manually.

In your GoToSocial config turn off letsencrypt by setting letsencrypt-enabled to false.

If you we running GoToSocial on port 443, change the port value back to the default 8080.

If the reverse proxy will be running on the same machine, set the bind-address to "localhost" so that the GoToSocial server is only accessible via loopback. Otherwise it may be possible to bypass your proxy by connecting to GoToSocial directly, which might be undesirable.

Set up NGINX

First we will set up NGINX to serve GoToSocial as unsecured http and then use Certbot to automatically upgrade it to serve https.

Please do not try to use it until that's done or you'll risk transmitting passwords over clear text, or breaking federation.

First we'll write a configuration for NGINX and put it in /etc/nginx/sites-available.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/nginx/sites-available
sudoedit /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourgotosocial.url.conf

In the above commands, replace yourgotosocial.url with your actual GoToSocial host value. So if your host is set to example.org, then the file should be called /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.org.conf

The file you're about to create should look like this:

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;
  server_name example.org;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
  }
  client_max_body_size 40M;
}

Change proxy_pass to the ip and port that you're actually serving GoToSocial on and change server_name to your own domain name.

If your domain name is example.org then server_name example.org; would be the correct value.

If you're running GoToSocial on another machine with the local ip of 192.168.178.69 and on port 8080 then proxy_pass http://192.168.178.69:8080; would be the correct value.

Note: You can remove the line listen [::]:80; if your server is not ipv6 capable.

Note: proxy_set_header Host $host; is essential. It guarantees that the proxy and GoToSocial use the same server name. If not, GoToSocial will build the wrong authentication headers, and all attempts at federation will be rejected with 401.

Note: The Connection and Upgrade headers are used for WebSocket connections. See the WebSocket docs.

Note: client_max_body_size is set to 40M in this example, which is the default max video upload size for GoToSocial. You can make this value larger or smaller if necessary. The nginx default is only 1M, which is rather too small.

Note: To make X-Forwarded-For and rate limiting work, set the trusted-proxies configuration variable. See the rate limiting and general configuration docs

Next we'll need to link the file we just created to the folder that nginx reads configurations for active sites from.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourgotosocial.url.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Again, replace yourgotosocial.url with your actual GoToSocial host value.

Now check for configuration errors.

sudo nginx -t

If everything is fine you should get this as output:

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Everything working? Great! Then restart nginx to load your new config file.

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Setting up SSL with certbot

You should now be able to run certbot and it will guide you through the steps required to enable https for your instance.

sudo certbot --nginx

After you do, it should have automatically edited your configuration file to enable https.

Reload NGINX one last time:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Now start GoToSocial again:

sudo systemctl start gotosocial

Results

You should now be able to open the splash page for your instance in your web browser, and will see that it runs under https!

If you open the NGINX config again, you'll see that Certbot added some extra lines to it.

Note: This may look a bit different depending on the options you chose while setting up Certbot, and the NGINX version you're using.

server {
  server_name example.org;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
  }
  client_max_body_size 40M;

  listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot
  listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.org/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.org/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
  include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
  ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
}

server {
  if ($host = example.org) {
      return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
  } # managed by Certbot

  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;
  server_name example.org;
    return 404; # managed by Certbot
}

Extra Hardening

If you want to harden up your NGINX deployment with advanced configuration options, there are many guides online for doing so (for example). Try to find one that's up to date. Mozilla also publishes best-practice ssl configuration here.

Caching Webfinger

It's possible to use nginx to cache the webfinger responses. This may be useful in order to ensure clients still get a response on the webfinger endpoint even if GTS is (temporarily) down.

You'll need to configure two things:

  • A cache path
  • An additional location block for webfinger

First, the cache path which needs to happen in the http section, usually inside your nginx.conf:

http {
  ... there will be other things here ...
  proxy_cache_path /var/cache/nginx keys_zone=ap_webfinger:10m inactive=1w;
}

This configures a cache of 10MB whose entries will be kept up to one week if they're not accessed. The zone is named ap_webfinger but you can name it whatever you want. 10MB is a lot of cache keys, you can probably use a much smaller value on small instances.

Second, actually use the cache for webfinger:

server {
  server_name example.org;
  location /.well-known/webfinger {
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

    proxy_cache ap_webfinger;
    proxy_cache_background_update on;
    proxy_cache_key $scheme://$host$uri$is_args$query_string;
    proxy_cache_valid 200 10m;
    proxy_cache_use_stale error timeout updating http_500 http_502 http_503 http_504 http_429;
    proxy_cache_lock on;
    add_header X-Cache-Status $upstream_cache_status;

    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
  }

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
  }
  client_max_body_size 40M;

  listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot
  listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.org/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.org/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
  include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
  ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
}

The proxy_pass and proxy_set_header are mostly the same, but the proxy_cache* entries warrant some explanation:

  • proxy_cache ap_webfinger tells it to use the ap_webfinger cache zone we previously created. If you named it something else, you should change this value
  • proxy_cache_background_update on means nginx will try and refresh a cached resource that's about to expire in the background, to ensure it has a current copy on disk
  • proxy_cache_key is configured in such a way that it takes the query string into account for caching. So a request for .well-known/webfinger?acct=user1@example.org and .well-known/webfinger?acct=user2@example.org are not seen as the same
  • proxy_cache_valid 200 10m; means we only cache 200 responses from GTS and for 10 minutes. You can add additional lines of these, like proxy_cache_valid 404 1m; to cache 404 responses for 1 minute
  • proxy_cache_use_stale tells nginx it's allowed to use a stale cache entry (so older than 10 minutes) in certain cases
  • proxy_cache_lock on means that if a resource is not cached and there's multiple concurrent requests for them, the queries will be queued up so that only one request goes through and the rest is then answered from cache
  • add_header X-Cache-Status $upstream_cache_status will add an X-Cache-Status header to the response so you can check if things are getting cached. You can remove this.

Tweaking proxy_cache_use_stale is how you can ensure webfinger responses are still answered even if GTS itself is down. The provided configuration will serve a stale response in case there's an error proxying to GTS, if our connection to GTS times out, if GTS returns a 5xx status code or if GTS returns 429 (Too Many Requests). The updating value says that we're allowed to serve a stale entry if nginx is currently in the process of refreshing its cache. Because we configured inactive=1w in the proxy_cache_path directive, nginx may serve a response up to one week old if the conditions in proxy_cache_use_stale are met.