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content/blog/install-miniflux-raspberry-pi.md

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+---
+title: "Install Miniflux on your Raspberry PI"
+date: 2020-04-08T00:00:00+02:00
+opensource: 
+- OpenWRT
+---
+
+In the article "[Nginx with TLS on OpenWRT](../nginx-with-tls-on-openwrt/)", I explained how to install Nginx with TLS support on a Raspberry PI.
+But without an application to protect, Nginx is quite useless.
+This article explains how to install [Miniflux](https://miniflux.app/) (a lightweight RSS reader) on your Raspberry PI and how to host it as an Nginx virtual host.
+
+Miniflux is a web application written in Go and backed by a PostgreSQL database. So we will need to install PostgreSQL, install miniflux and setup Nginx. The rest of this article assumes you [installed OpenWRT on your Raspberry](../install-openwrt-raspberry-pi/), but it should be applicable to any Linux distribution with minimal changes.
+
+## Install PostgreSQL
+
+Install the **pgsql-server** and **pgsql-cli** packages.
+
+```sh
+opkg update
+opkg install pgsql-server pgsql-cli
+```
+
+Create a directory to hold PostgreSQL data (for instance **/srv/postgresql/data**).
+
+```sh
+mkdir -p /srv/postgresql/data
+uci set postgresql.config.PGDATA=/srv/postgresql/data
+uci set postgresql.config.PGLOG=/srv/postgresql/data/postgresql.log
+uci commit
+chown postgres:postgres /srv/postgresql/data
+```
+
+Initialize the database.
+
+```sh
+cd /srv/postgresql/data
+sudo -u postgres /bin/ash -c 'LC_COLLATE="C" initdb —pwprompt -D /srv/postgresql/data'
+```
+
+Enable and start the PostgreSQL service.
+
+```sh
+service postgresql enable
+service postgresql start
+```
+
+**Note:** if you need to start/stop the database manually, you can do so with the following commands:
+
+```sh
+sudo -u postgres /bin/ash -c 'LC_COLLATE="C" pg_ctl -D /srv/postgresql/data -l logfile start'
+sudo -u postgres /bin/ash -c 'LC_COLLATE="C" pg_ctl -D /srv/postgresql/data -l logfile stop'
+```
+
+To be able to connect to the database by just typing **psql** in a command prompt, you have to create a PostgreSQL user for each Unix user.
+In the following example, *root* can do everything and *nicolas* can create new databases.
+
+```sh
+sudo -u postgres psql -c 'CREATE USER root SUPERUSER;'
+sudo -u postgres psql -c 'CREATE USER nicolas CREATEDB;'
+```
+
+## Install Miniflux
+
+If not already done yet, install the required libraries to handle HTTPS URLs in **wget**.
+This is required by the next step (download from github.com over HTTPS).
+
+```sh
+opkg update
+opkg install libustream-mbedtls ca-bundle ca-certificates
+```
+
+Install Miniflux in **/opt/miniflux**.
+
+```sh
+mkdir -p /opt/miniflux/bin
+wget -O /opt/miniflux/bin/miniflux https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux/releases/download/2.0.19/miniflux-linux-armv8
+chmod 755 /opt/miniflux/bin/miniflux
+```
+
+Create a Unix user and a PostgreSQL user named **miniflux**.
+
+```sh
+useradd -d /var/run/miniflux -s /bin/false -m -r miniflux
+sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE USER miniflux WITH PASSWORD 'miniflux';"
+sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE miniflux OWNER miniflux;"
+```
+
+Check that users and database are setup correctly with the following command (no error message should appear here).
+
+```sh
+psql -h 127.0.0.1 miniflux miniflux
+cd /tmp && sudo -u miniflux psql miniflux -c ''
+```
+
+Create the hstore extension required by Miniflux.
+
+```sh
+sudo -u postgres psql miniflux -c 'CREATE EXTENSION hstore;'
+```
+
+Configure Miniflux with the database connection URL and the port to listen on.
+
+```sh
+mkdir -p /opt/miniflux/etc
+cat > /opt/miniflux/etc/miniflux.conf <<EOF
+DATABASE_URL=postgres://miniflux:miniflux@localhost/miniflux?sslmode=disable
+LISTEN_ADDR=8001
+EOF
+chown miniflux:miniflux /opt/miniflux/etc/miniflux.conf
+chmod 600 /opt/miniflux/etc/miniflux.conf
+```
+
+Initialize the Miniflux database.
+
+```sh
+/opt/miniflux/bin/miniflux -c /opt/miniflux/etc/miniflux.conf -migrate
+/opt/miniflux/bin/miniflux -c /opt/miniflux/etc/miniflux.conf -create-admin
+```
+
+Create an init script for Miniflux (**/etc/init.d/miniflux** for instance).
+
+```sh
+#!/bin/sh /etc/rc.common
+# Miniflux
+
+# Start after PostgreSQL (S50)
+START=80
+STOP=20
+
+start() {
+  start-stop-daemon -c miniflux -u miniflux -x /opt/miniflux/bin/miniflux -b -S -- -c /opt/miniflux/etc/miniflux.conf
+}
+
+stop() {
+  start-stop-daemon -c miniflux -u miniflux -x /opt/miniflux/bin/miniflux -b -K
+}
+```
+
+Enable and start the **miniflux** service.
+
+```sh
+service miniflux enable
+service miniflux start
+```
+
+If everything goes well, you should see a process binding port 8001.
+
+```
+# netstat -tlnp
+Active Internet connections (only servers)
+Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name    
+tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      517/dropbear
+tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:5432          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      676/postmaster
+tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:8001          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      804/miniflux
+```
+
+## Configure the Nginx virtual host
+
+Edit your nginx configuration file and, as explained in "[Nginx with TLS on OpenWRT](../nginx-with-tls-on-openwrt/)", insert a new **server** directive after the last one.
+
+The only difference is that we are not serving static files from the filesystem but rather forwarding requests to a backend service.
+
+So the **root** directive in the **location /** block needs to be replace by a **proxy_pass** directive.
+
+```
+server {
+    listen 443 ssl;
+    server_name miniflux.pi.example.test;
+
+    ... redacted ...
+
+    location / {
+        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8001;
+    }
+}
+```
+
+**Note:** Do not insert a slash at the end of the URL, otherwise you would [get a very different behavior](http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_pass).
+
+Of course, you would also need to add a new DNS entry for the hostname of this new virtual host and renew your TLS certificate to include it.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+This article explained how to install [Miniflux](https://miniflux.app/) on your Raspberry PI and how to host it as an Nginx virtual host.
+
+If you liked this article, you can use your freshly installed Miniflux instance to [subscribe to my RSS feed](/index.xml)!

content/blog/nginx-with-tls-on-openwrt.md

@@ -408,4 +408,4 @@ And an entry to renew the certificate using lego.
 Nginx is now installed on your Raspberry PI, with TLS support enabled and a valid public certificate from Let's Encrypt that will be renewed automatically.
 The configuration serves a default virtual host to every bot that queries the nginx instance by its IP address and can serve any number of virtual host, provided you add the matching *server* block.
 
-Discover in the next article how to deploy a real world application: miniflux, an RSS reader.
+Discover in the next article how to [deploy a real world application: miniflux, an RSS reader](../install-miniflux-raspberry-pi/).