This guide aims to walk you through the process of setting up a server with a dockerized version of nginx, let's encrypt and PlanarAlly so that you can run your own instance of the amazing virtual tabletop software created by Kruptein.
Before we begin make sure to have:
- a server with a static IP (a CX11 from Hetzner works really well for 3.04€/month)
- a domain with full control on your DNS records (if you need to buy one I suggest Gandi.net and Porkbun)
- an A/CNAME record called planarally pointing to your server static IP (even pa.yourdomain.com or anything else will work, just remember to have an A/CNAME pointing to your IP and use it in Part Two of the installation)
The instructions in this page are ready for a quick copy and paste session in an Ubuntu 18.04 environment, but should work in every Linux environment (you'd just need to adjust them a little in some cases).
First of all we need to install the tools we'll be using to put everything in place.
Let's refresh the repositories and make sure we have everything in place to install Docker:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common
Now let's add Docker's GPG key...
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
... and its repository:
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu bionic stable"
Ok, now let's update our repositories and install Docker:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install docker-ce
To check if everything went well you can run this command and see docker running on your system:
sudo systemctl status docker
We're almost there! Docker is up and running on our server, we just need to install Docker Compose, a nice utility that will help us in the next steps. Let's download Docker Compose binaries and put them into /usr/local/bin folder:
sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.25.4/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
Now give them the right permissions:
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
And here we go: Docker and Docker Compose are ready to be used on our server!
This part is not needed to setup a PlanarAlly server, but if you want to have more services running alongside PA - like I do - it's useful to have something acting as webserver and reverse proxy (ignore these words and follow the instruction if they means nothing to you).
We're going to use a docker image created and maintained by the awesome guys at Linuxserver.io: check their works if you're intrested in docker since it's always top notch ;)
Ok, first things first: let's create a directory in our home where we'll put all our stuff. To do so we'll position ourself in our home directory.
cd
Let's create the folder (you can name it as you want, but I'll refer to it as webserver from now on) and move there.
mkdir webserver && cd webserver
Now we need to create a docker-compose.yml file where we're going to configure (almost) everything we need.
nano docker-compose.yml
Here's where the magic happens so paste this in nano and edit it following your needs:
version: "2"
services:
letsencrypt:
image: linuxserver/letsencrypt
container_name: letsencrypt
cap_add:
- NET_ADMIN
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=Europe/London
- URL=yourdomain.com
- SUBDOMAINS=planarally
- VALIDATION=http
- EMAIL=your@email.com
- DHLEVEL=2048
volumes:
- /home/USER/webserver/persistent:/config
ports:
- 443:443
- 80:80
restart: unless-stopped
Basically what you need to check are those lines:
- TZ=Europe/London
- URL=yourdomain.com
- SUBDOMAINS=planarally
Here you should set your timezone, your domain and the subdomain with the A/CNAME record pointing to your server. Remember to also set a working email here - EMAIL=your@email.com since you'll receive there any information regarding your SSL certificate.
Change this path - /home/USER/webserver/persistent:/config by using your actual username instead of "USER".
Save the file and let's run this thing!
sudo docker-compose up -d
Give it a few minutes and you should have a nice nginx webserver up and running. To check everything's fine you should open a browser and go to https://planarally.yourdomain.com: it should show a white page with a "Welcome to our server" title.
Ok, now we just need to prepare nginx to act as reverse proxy for your PlanarAlly docker image (again, if this means nothing to you just copy and paste). To do so, we need to add a configuration file in our proxy-confs folder:
cd webserver/persistent/nginx/proxy-confs
nano planarally.subdomain.conf
In the empty file just created paste this:
server {
listen 443 ssl;
listen [::]:443 ssl;
server_name planarally.*;
include /config/nginx/ssl.conf;
client_max_body_size 0;
#enable for ldap auth, fill in ldap details in ldap.conf
#include /config/nginx/ldap.conf;
location / {
#enable the next two lines for http auth
#auth_basic "Restricted";
#auth_basic_user_file /config/nginx/.htpasswd;
#enable the next two lines for ldap auth
#auth_request /auth;
#error_page 401 =200 /login;
include /config/nginx/proxy.conf;
resolver 127.0.0.11 valid=30s;
set $upstream_app planarally;
set $upstream_port 8000;
set $upstream_proto http;
proxy_pass $upstream_proto://$upstream_app:$upstream_port;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
proxy_set_header Host $host;
}
}
Save, close and we're ready to finally add PlanarAlly to our mix!
There's little to do here actually, we just need to return to our docker-compose.yml file and add a section for PlanarAlly. To do so first position yourself back into our work directory and then edit the file we created early with:
nano docker-compose.yml
Add these lines at the end of that file:
planarally:
image: 'kruptein/planarally'
container_name: planarally
volumes:
- 'data:/planarally/data'
- 'assets:/planarally/static/assets'
restart: always
volumes:
data:
assets:
Save and let's run again docker-compose.
sudo docker-compose stop && sudo docker-compose up -d
Wait a couple of minutes (based on how beefy is your server) and go to https://planarally.yourdomain.com: you should now see your PlanarAlly instance ready to be configured and used to play (here you can find its documentation if you feel a little lost).
If there's anything incorrect in this guide or you need help in setting everything up you can reach me on the official Discord channel of PlanarAlly (ping edmael so I can see it).
Don't forget to thank Kruptein for his amazing work and maybe consider donating to his Patreon page.
Thanks also the guys at Linuxserver.io for their stupidly simple docker images and thanks to Stefano for helping me out with basically everything docker related.