Freifunk Website Proxy

This project has a follow-up: https://github.com/AmmanVMS/dynamic-website-reverse-proxy/

This is a tool to make local services served in a community network available to the outside internet. The intention is to

1. lower the bar to create internet services
2. increase accessibility from inside and outside the community network and thus make services in the network more attractive

Using the Server

You create an http service in the local community network. Then, you go to this service installation for your community.

• Potsdam

You put in your ip address, your server name and your port. When you submit, your website should be available under the hostname you entered.

Setting up a Server

You can setup the server for your community in case the server is not there.

1. Install docker. You will need a 64 bit computer.

   wget -O- https://get.docker.com | sh
   

2. Start the server replacing the configuration variables accordingly.

   docker run -p "80:80" -e "DOMAIN=MY-DOMAIN" -d --rm niccokunzmann/freifunk-website-proxy
   

   Now, the server should be available at http://localhost.
3. Once the server is available, you need to configure the router of yours to forward the traffic. I.e. this could be your internet gateway available at http://192.168.0.1. Somewhere you can find the "Port Forwarding" (DE: Portfreigabe/Portweiterleitung) Here, you can configure the gateway to forward traffic from port 80 to your IP on port 80.
4. Setup a domain name. In case you have just a home router, you can use e.g. http://selfhost.eu to get a free of charge dynamic domain name.
5. In order for other people to reach not only your domain name but also other services on this domain, you need to setup a cname record.
   • Example: You registered quelltext.selfhost.eu free of charge. Now, you pay 2€/year and you buy quelltext.eu. Then, you setup the CNAME record *.quelltext.eu to point to quelltext.selfhost.eu.
   • You can also contact @niccokunzmann in an issue if you like to use a domain named my-community.quelltext.eu.
   • Your community has a website e.g. freifunk-potsdam.de. They can setup service.freifunk-potsdam.de and *.service.freifunk-potsdam.de to point to your domain.
6. Configure your gateway to update the IP address behind the domain name. Your gateway usually has a dyndns configuration which you can configure. This will update the registered dynamic domain name once your provider switches your IP address.

Once these steps are undergone, you should be able to access your server from the internet using your domain and be able to register new clients. Note that this looks like a lot bot this would be necessary for many more people to provide their services. Once this is done, they have a much easier process to share their site.

Configuration

The configuration of the service is done via environment variables. This is the configuration you should touch:

• DOMAIN default localhost
  This is the domain your servers serves from. If DOMAIN is "test.freifunk.net", new a hostname "chocolate" is prepended so the website is served under "chocolate.test.freifunk.net".
• NETWORK default 10.0.0.0/8
  This is the network address of the accepted services. I.e. Freifunk in Potsdam covers 10.22.0.0/16.

This is configuration you can touch:

• DATABASE
  This is the place the data is stored when the service restarts.
  • default for the Python app is `` and nothing will be saved to a file.
  • default for the docker container is /data/db.pickle which holds the state of the proxy.
• SOURCE_CODE
  This is the directory the currently running source code can be obtained from.
  • default for the Python app is the module directory.
  • default for the docker container is /app-

Development

Run the server

python3 -m freifunk_website_proxy

Build the server and run it

docker build --tag niccokunzmann/freifunk-website-proxy . && docker run -p "9000:80" -e "DOMAIN=localhost:9000" -it --rm niccokunzmann/freifunk-website-proxy

Now, you can reach your server under http://localhost:9000.

Run the tests

watch -n 0.5 pytest

Further Reading

• Diskussion im FreiFunk-Forum