Noob using Bitnami; ports and security, help!

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1

Heya.

So I’m using Bitnami to run a pod on Google Cloud. When I test join my pod, I see 1. that my user URL includes a colon and a port (80) and 2. that the site isn’t fully secure. It says images, specifically, aren’t.

I know nearly nothing about all this, ha. Anyone have any pointers/explanations? Did I not complete all the steps I needed to?

Thanks!

2

The general advice is “don’t use Bitnami or anything else that claims to be able to set up diaspora*”, because they can’t. Our official installation docs are found in the wiki, and they explain everything, including the config files.

that my user URL includes a colon and a port (80)

This is bad, because it means the url setting in diaspora.yml is wrong. The url should be set to the URL the pod is accessible on, and that should always be a https addess without a port. Note that there is no way to actually change that. If you do change the config, you have to delete your database and start over.

Good news is that you will not burn your diaspora id, as alice@example.com:80 and alice@example.com shouldn’t be the same as far as diaspora* sees things, so you’re good to drop the database this one time as far as I know. However, if you fixed your URL and you created a user with the correct diaspora handle, do not drop your database again. You’ll lose your encryption key, and that means you’ll never be able to use the same diaspora* handle, ever.

that the site isn’t fully secure. It says images, specifically, aren’t.

That’s hard to tell from my point. Two possibilities:

  1. there is a misconfiguration in your system where it sends assets over http instead of https, but everything else is sent over https. This would be fixed by using the nginx/apache configs we provide in our install docs and making sure the url setting in diaspora.yml actually is https (again, changing that won’t fix your issues unless you’re dropping your database)
  2. What you’re seeing are http-assets from other pods. Now, this should pretty much never happen, because production pods pretty much always use https, but you can install and integrate Camo to make your pod proxy all requests to external assets.