spamgourmet-clone

These are instructions and a helper script to clone the spamgourmet website

Everything below is built on the shoulders of:

1. Josh Parris see here
2. cgz see here
3. cndpost see here

I and you owe them many thanks.

NB. This is very brittle, the script does absolutely no error checking.

NB. Although Spamgourmet runs on apache, because I wanted my clone to use as few resources as possible, I replaced it with lighttpd in this install script.

You WILL have problems running it :-) if you do not follow the instructions to the letter (and probably even if you do).

Prerequisites

Before you attempt to run this script from a root shell on the target host you should:

1. have a default Debian install on a machine you control
2. ensure you can ssh as root with no password to your host (i.e. with a ssh key)
3. ensure you can set up LetsEncrypt for your domain, and reach a state where the certificate renewal actually renews your certificates by simply running cd /var/lib/dehydrated; dehydrated -c.
4. have asked your hosting provider to set up reverse DNS (rDNS) to resolve to your example.com (replace this with your own domain), and ensured that they did it by running host ip.addr.of.host.
5. have configured your example.com and a subdomain called ob.example.com with the following zone records:
   1. A record for example.com pointing to your host running the clone
   2. A record for ob.example.com pointing to your host running the clone
   3. MX record for example.com pointing to example.com
   4. MX record for ob.example.com pointing to example.com
   5. DMARC and DKIM for example.com set up as instructed here.
6. have recursively copied the dehydrated folder (including its subdirectories accounts, certs and chains in the same folder as the one where you copied remote-install.sh (normally in /root)
7. have copied the dkim.private and dkim.public keys generated for the DKIM DNS records next to the remote-install.sh
8. make sure you have a large enough scrollback buffer for your terminal to not lose any output

HowTo

The LetsEncrypt configuration is quite OVH specific. If you host your domain with OVH you can run the install command as SETUP_LETSENCRYPTOVH=true remote-install.sh - otherwise you are on your own with the configuration.

Just ssh as root (passwordless please) to the target host and run the remote-install.sh script (with OVH setup as above if you want). Then closely scrutinize the output for any errors.

At the end you should hopefully have a working clone of spamgourmet.com

This is out of scope but do not forget to ensure that you have a proper firewall on the host, and that you set up regular backups.

FYI my private spamgourmet clone runs very well on a KVM VM with 1vCPU, 512MB RAM and 7GB disk (1.51GB used at the end of the script). The VM runs Debian 10.10 on zfs root.