ngman

A lightweight abstraction layer around nginx and lego

Homepage / Demo: https://textzentrisch.de/pages/ngman/

Features

  • Launch a new website with a single command
  • Supports static locations
  • Supports reverse proxy locations
  • Simplified declarative or imperative configuration
  • Automatic SSL certificate generation and renewal

It basically aims at making nginx as easy to configure as Caddy. At least regarding the specific use-cases of static site hosting and reverse proxying.

Requirements

  1. A linux (Ubuntu 22.04) based web-server with root shell access
  2. A domain name pointing to the ip address of the web-server

NOTE: Currently the setup.sh script uses apt to install podman and unzip. It should also work correctly if you just pre-install these commands via your package manager of choice and then run setup.sh script.

In combination with podman and a pre-configured nginx container, you can do some pretty cool stuff. These examples use a container that has been built from the ngman/Nginx subdirectory.

Self-hosted HTTPS content in three steps

1. Setup a Web Server
curl -sL https://github.com/memmaker/ngman/releases/download/v1.0.2/setup.sh | bash -s <your-acme-mail>

2. Add a site with the respective domain
ngman add-site <your-domain>

3. Publish your content
echo "It Works" > /var/www/<your-domain>/index.html

You can now visit https://<your-domain>/ in the browser and will see “It Works”.

Self-hosted HTTPS reverse proxy in three steps

1. Setup a Web Server
curl -sL https://github.com/memmaker/ngman/releases/download/v1.0.2/setup.sh | bash -s <your-acme-mail>

2. Startup your service container
podman run --name webserver --network podnet -dt docker.io/library/httpd:alpine

3. Add your service to ngman
ngman add-proxy <your-domain> http://webserver:80

You can now visit https://<your-domain>/ in the browser and will see “It Works”.

Adding new sites locations

You can add additional virtual hosts to your web server by using the respective command:

ngman add-site <your-domain>
or
ngman add-location <your-domain> /static /var/www/<your-domain>/static
or
ngman add-proxy <your-domain> http://webserver:80

These will

  • update your site’s configuration,
  • write a new nginx configuration file,
  • make sure that the SSL certificate is available
  • and reload the nginx container.

Alternatively you can also edit the configuration file directly:

ngman edit <your-domain>

What does setup.sh do?

  1. Installs podman
  2. Installs ngman
  3. Generate DH parameters for HTTPS
  4. Setup a container network with DNS support
  5. Start an pre-configured nginx container that includes lego
  6. Setup a cronjob for automatic SSL certificate renewal

Concepts of ngman

A site is uniquely identified by the domain name.

This tool supports two types of locations: static & proxy.

A site can have multiple static and proxy locations.

The configuration and state of this tool is kept under its config directory. By default, that is “~/.ngman/” and the tool will create it on first start. I am using TOML as the configuration format.

The config directory also needs to contain “nginx.txt”, the file with all the partial templates. You can easily adapt that file to your needs to adjust the nginx configurations created.

For every site that it manages the tool will create a file in the ~/.ngman/sites/ directory.

You can always re-create all the nginx config files by running ngman write-all.

Global settings (config.toml)

Example config.toml file in a production environment:

CertificateRootPath = '/ssl/certificates'
SiteStorageDirectory = '/root/.ngman/sites'
NginxSiteConfigDirectory = '/etc/nginx/sites-enabled'
TemplateFile = '/root/.ngman/nginx.txt'
PostRunCommand = 'service nginx reload'
GenerateCertCommand = 'create_ssl_cert'

CertificateRootPath

The path to the directory where the SSL certificates are stored. The files are expected to conform to the following naming scheme:

<domain>.key
<domain>.crt

SiteStorageDirectory

The path to the directory where the TOML site configuration files are stored. Must be writable by the user executing the tool.

NginxSiteConfigDirectory

This is the main output directory for the nginx config files.

TemplateFile

The path to the file that contains the nginx config templates.

The template language used is Go’s text/template.

PostRunCommand

ngman will try to execute this command after it has made any changes to nginx configuration files.

GenerateCertCommand

ngman will try to execute this command when it needs to generate a new SSL certificate. It will pass the respective domain name as the first argument.

Usage

ngman list                                                               
ngman create <domain> <root-path>                   
ngman add-static <domain> <root-path> <uri-location>                     
ngman add-proxy <domain> <endpoint> <uri-location>                       
ngman edit <domain>                                                      
ngman delete <domain>                                                    
ngman write-all

Advanced Usage

PHP-FPM Support

You can add the key UsePHP to a site config to enable PHP-FPM support.

Example:

Domain = 'example.org'
RootPath = '/var/www/example'
UsePHP = true # <-- this is the important part

ngman will then insert the template called “php-fpm-support” from the “nginx.txt” file into the nginx configuration of that site.

Misc. Options

The TOML files for the site configuration also allow adding an array of miscellaneous options to the nginx config file.

Every string to be found in the array called “MiscOptions” in a site configuration will be inserted as a single line into the nginx config file.

Example:

Domain = 'example.com'
RootPath = '/var/www/example.com'
MiscOptions = [
    'gzip on',
    'gzip_disable "msie6"',
    'gzip_vary on',
    'gzip_proxied any'
]

Note: The semicolon is appended automatically in the config template.

Chunks

When creating the nginx configuration files, ngman also looks into a directory called chunks for files named like the domain name.

config.SiteStorageDirectory + "/chunks/" + domain
eg. example.org -> /root/.ngman/sites/chunks/example.org

These configuration chunks are inserted into the nginx site configuration file as is. This mechanism can be used for further customizations of individual sites.

Wildcard certificate support

ngman will assume that any subdomain will require a wildcard certificate.

So if you add a site with a domain like “example.org” a normal LetsEncrypt certificate will be generated.

However, if you add a site with a domain like “sub.example.org” a wildcard certificate will be generated and used.

Subsequent sites with a domain like “foo.example.org” will then also use the same wildcard certificate.

Standalone usage of ngman

NOTE: ALL THE FOLLOWING IS ALREADY INCLUDED AND AUTOMATED IN THE setup.sh file and mmx23/nginx image

I suggest using lego in combination with podman for certificate generation. You can then do something like this

create_ssl_cert () {
    podman run \
    --env [YOUR-DOMAIN-API-TOKEN] \
    -v /ssl:/lego \
    goacme/lego \
    --accept-tos \
    --path /lego \
    --email [YOUR-EMAIL] \
    --dns dode \
    --domains "$@" \
    run
}

Which will create a command as expected by ngman, where you just have to provide a domain name as argument.

For certificate renewal, I suggest something like this

for keyfile in $(sudo ls /ssl/certificates/ | grep key)
do
    replaced="${keyfile/_/*}"
    renew_ssl_cert "${replaced%.*}" >> /tmp/cert.log
done

Where renew_ssl_cert is the same as create_ssl_cert, but with the run command replaced by renew.

Installation

ARCH=darwin_amd64;
mkdir ~/.ngman > /dev/null 2>&1;
pushd;
cd ~/.ngman && \
wget https://github.com/memmaker/ngman/releases/latest/download/nginx.txt && \
wget https://github.com/memmaker/ngman/releases/latest/download/ngman_${ARCH}.zip && \ 
unzip ngman_${ARCH}.zip && rm ngman_${ARCH}.zip && \
mv ngman_${ARCH} /usr/local/bin/ngman && popd

Uninstall

rm -rf ~/.ngman && rm /usr/local/bin/ngman

GitHub

View Github