🖥️Hosting SNApps

Depending on the nature of the application or service which you want to make accessible over Lokinet, you may want to only run a temporary SNApp, or a SNApp that continues to persistently use the same .loki pubkey.

A temporary SNApp is a service accessible over Lokinet that does not have a permanent address. This means that the address you supply to others will not work once the server hosting the SNApp is restarted.

If you want users to be able to access your application or service over an extended period of time, a temporary SNApp is not recommended.

If you only want to host a temporary SNApp, jump to Step 2.

Note: This guide assumes you are running a standard Debian or Ubuntu Linux distribution on the machine on which you'll be hosting the SNApp and that you have Lokinet installed and running on this machine, if not please follow the guide here to get Lokinet running. This guide also assumes you are relatively familiar with using the command line.

Step 1: Preparing your Lokinet address

Start by opening your lokinet.ini file and adding a path to where your SNApp key files will be stored.

If you have installed Lokinet from Deb packages, you can open your lokinet.ini file in the nano text editor with the following command:

sudo nano /etc/loki/lokinet.ini

Otherwise, if you have built Lokinet from source, your lokinet.ini file will be in the folder ~/.lokinet/lokinet.ini, and can be opened in nano with the following command:

sudo nano ~/.lokinet/lokinet.ini

With lokinet.ini open in the text editor, scroll down to your [network] section and add the following line:

keyfile=/var/lib/lokinet/snappkey.private

Alternatively, you can set the filepath to wherever you want your SNApp private key to be stored.

Now, when you restart Lokinet, it will generate your snappkey.private file in the directory you have set.

sudo systemctl restart lokinet

Step 2: Finding your SNApp's Lokinet address

You can find your SNApp's current address using a host lookup tool:

nslookup -type=cname localhost.loki 127.0.0.1

You can also use the host command (the .loki address to query is the same, but the resolver uses the address 127.3.2.1 as to not conflict with other resolvers you may have installed):

host -t cname localhost.loki 127.3.2.1

Step 3: Install nginx

Install a proper web server:

sudo apt install nginx

Step 4: Configure nginx

Setup a Lokinet exclusive SNApp

If you want your SNApp to be accessible only via Lokinet and not via your IP address or domain name then you will need to configure nginx to run only on the lokinet interface.

First we will need to set the Lokinet interface IP range, we can do this by accessing our Lokinet config file as we did in Step 1 and adding this line in the [network]section:

ifaddr=10.67.0.1/16

this can go underneath your existing network config changes, after this change is made restart Lokinet using:

sudo systemctl restart lokinet

Once Lokinet is restarted run the following command to open your nginx default configuration file, we are going to make a few changes here.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

change any listen directives to use the lokinet IP 10.67.0.1 remove any IPV6 listen directives and replace the .loki address after server_name with the Lokinet address you discovered in Step 2

This should leave your default file in sites available looking something like this:

server {
        listen 10.67.0.1:80;

        root /var/www/html;

        # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name 73qqjm7ju98g6obua8bprce1tjyyphnotknnijhpn8mypwumqs8o.loki;

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }

}

save the changes and exit the file. Once this step is complete you can reload nginx with the following command:

systemctl reload nginx

Proceed to Step 6

Setup a clearnet and Lokinet accessible SNApp

If you want your SNApp to be accessible via Lokinet and your clearnet IP/Domain name then fewer changes are required. First open /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default using:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Then add your .loki address (which you discovered in Step 2) as a server_name, after the changes your nginx default file should look something like this:

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;

        root /var/www/html;

        # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

        server_name _ 73qqjm7ju98g6obua8bprce1tjyyphnotknnijhpn8mypwumqs8o.loki;

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }
}

Proceed to Step 6

Nginx Tips:

TIP: By default, you can drop files into /var/www/html to serve them as a SNApp. Make sure they are accessible via the www-data user (or whichever user nginx runs as.

TIP: You can make nginx generate a directory listing of files by adding autoindex on; on a new line into the location block in the nginx config file.

Step 5. Security (Optional)

Make sure no services bind to all interfaces.

Suggested UFW firewall settings when using nginx:

# change me to the range used by lokinet
LOKINET_RANGE=10.0.0.0/16

# drop all from lokinet
ufw deny from $LOKINET_RANGE

# allow tcp 80 from lokinet
ufw allow 80/tcp from $LOKINET_RANGE

Step 6: All done!

Congratulations! Your SNApp should now be accessible over Lokinet. Use the Lokinet address you discovered in Step 2, to access your SNApp