Adding remark42 to my blog

[criticalcake]

Hi guys,

I'm new to hosting services and my own site.
It would be very kind, if you could help me out, to get remark42 working on my blog.

For my blog I subscribed to a webhosting offer, which works fine.
Since I cannot host docker containers with my subscription, I had to rent a vps.
As I am new to vps, I spent several weeks to set this up properly.

This is my setup:

• Domain registration through my webhosting subscription
• In my DNS-settings *, @ and remark42 are pointing to my vps
• vps with ubuntu 20.04, nginx, ufw, fail2ban, docker-compose, certbot
• I followed several guides on digital ocean and elsewhere for the initial setup
• Also I tried to restrict access to my vps wherever possible and put effort in securing my environment
• With ufw I only allow access to OpenSSH, 443/tcp and a special port for remark42 (e.g. 12345)
• My blog works fine and is reachable through https
• My remark42-container is running fine as there are no errors in my docker logs

However the remark42 "quick installation test" fails, https://remark42.mydomain.com/web is not available.
Due to my lack of knowledge, I assume, there might be a wrong configuration with my nginx settings.
I didn't touch my nginx.conf file, but I added configuration-files in /etc/nginx/sites-available (which I attached):
mydomain.com
remark42.mydomain.com

mydomain.com.txt
remark42.mydomain.com.txt

I know they look different to the nginx configuration in the remark42 repository:
https://github.com/umputun/remark42/blob/master/docs/latest/nginx-proxy.md

But I didn't want to screw up any of the certbot settings. The remark42-nginx-documentation states:

note: proxy_pass points to internal DNS name remark42 and expected to run from the same compose. If nginx runs outside of compose the real IP (or docker's bridge IP) should be used

So maybe I use the wrong proxy_pass ip?
I tried all of the following values, but with no success:

proxy_pass https://45.69.156.134/; # example for my vps ip
proxy_pass https://45.69.156.134:12345/; # example ip and port
proxy_pass https://mydomain.com:12345/;
proxy_pass https://remark42.mydomain/;
proxy_pass https://remark42.mydomain:12345/;
proxy_pass https://172.18.0.2:12345/; # ip and port of my remark42-container
proxy_pass https://172.18.0.2/;

In my docker-compose.yml I've specified REMARK_PORT=12345
I cannot figure out, how to even get https://remark42.mydomain.com/web working.

Any ideas? Could someone please point me to the right direction?

Many thanks in advance!

[paskal]

Please post docker-compose logs output for your container to pastebin, it will help investigation greatly.

[criticalcake]

@paskal I didn't know about pastebin, great tool, thanks for sharing!

Here are the logs, configuration files or any other output, that might be helpful:

docker-compose logs
docker-compose.yml
nginx configuration for mydomain.com
nginx configuration for remark42.mydomain.com
ufw status verbose
ss -tulpn

In the docker-compose logs, there is a warning that the cert file was not found (https server terminated).
I double checked the permisions, which seem to be fine and also the remark42-container runs with APP_UID=0 (=root).
So I don`t know how to fix this warning. But then again, it's just a warning.
I assume, that at least the default "/web" demo page should work under that warning, right?

But keep in mind, that I try to get the remark42 container working as a non-root user.
Please let me know, if you need any other data and I will provide it through pastebin.

Any help is very much appreciated!

[criticalcake]

I solved the ssl warning by changing the SSL_TYPE to 'auto' in my docker-compose.yml:

docker-compose logs with ssl_type=auto

Unfortunately the remark42-demo page still doesn't show up.
I assume, it must be available under https://remark42.mydomain.com/web
But I get 400 Bad Request - Request Header Or Cookie Too Large

[paskal]

Problem in the first docker-compose log: [WARN] {api/rest.go:122 api.(*Rest).Run} https server terminated, open /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com/fullchain.pem: no such file or directory, after which remark42 is terminated.

In the second log, I saw no access entries so requests don't seem to reach it. After you changed the settings I think the problem is that your Nginx tries to connect to itself instead of connecting to the container, as your container is not exposing any ports to the host machine.

Remove following lines from your docker-compose.yml to disable HTTPS termination inside remark42 container, as we want your nginx to handle the HTTPS part and talk to remark backend by HTTP.

            - SSL_TYPE=static
            - SSL_PORT=443
            - SSL_CERT=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com/fullchain.pem
            - SSL_KEY=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.com/privkey.pem

Then expose port 8080 of remark container to the host but only locally, to do that add the following lines to the same container configuration:

        ports:
           - "127.0.0.1:8080:8080"

The last step is fixing nginx configuration proxy_pass to point to remark42 container exposed locally on port 8080:

proxy_pass              http://localhost:8080/;

After that please try again and if it doesn't work, please post the docker-compose logs of the container and nginx logs after few attempts to reach the comments.

[criticalcake]

@paskal Thank you very much for your help! 🙏

I followed your suggestions and modified my docker-compose.yml and the nginx configuration for remark42.mydomain.com.
Unfortunately it still doesn't work, although I cleared the browser cache and also changed the browser. 😢
I removed REMARK_PORT=12345 from the docker-compose.yml, but still no success.

docker-compose logs 2
nginx remark42.log
nginx error.log
nginx access.log

[akellbl4]

@criticalcake hey! let's check the frontend filed in the docker container.
try to do docker exec %container_id ls -la web (replace %container_id with your container id from docker ps)

[criticalcake]

@akellbl4 thanks for your reply!

I have good news, finaly:
I removed the working_dir parameter from my docker-compose.yml, now I have access to https://remark42.mydomain.com/web !

remark42@myvps:/opt/remark42$ docker exec 2he45b46bz71 ls -la web
total 1492
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     app           4096 Jan 31 13:08 .
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     app           4096 Jan 31 13:08 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           2166 Apr 26  2020 comments.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           1479 Apr 26  2020 counter.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           2324 Jan 31 13:08 counter.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app          10024 Jan 31 13:08 de.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           1586 Apr 26  2020 deleteme.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app         114048 Jan 31 13:08 deleteme.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           7461 Jan 31 13:08 embed.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           9130 Jan 31 13:08 es.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           8902 Jan 31 13:08 fi.js
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     app           4096 Apr 26  2020 files
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           4133 Apr 26  2020 iframe.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           3906 Apr 26  2020 index.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           7086 Jan 31 13:08 intersection-observer.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app          25927 Apr 26  2020 last-comments.css
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           1064 Apr 26  2020 last-comments.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app         155469 Jan 31 13:08 last-comments.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           9792 Apr 26  2020 markdown-help.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app          44382 Apr 26  2020 remark.css
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app         323125 Jan 31 13:08 remark.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app         496110 Apr 26  2020 report.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app          12078 Jan 31 13:08 ru.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app         159975 Jan 31 13:08 vendors~core-js.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app          42605 Jan 31 13:08 vendors~node-emoji.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           7868 Jan 31 13:08 whatwg-fetch.js
-rw-r--r--    1 root     app           8028 Jan 31 13:08 zh.js

So finally this is working for /web.
However I cannot add a comment at /web. The docker-compose logs tell me, that site "remark" not found.
I assume "remark" is the default site id. However I have configured site=mydomain in my docker-compose.yml

remark42    | 2021/01/31 13:09:13.181 [WARN]  {rest/httperrors.go:85 rest.SendErrorJSON} can't get last comments - site "remark" not found - 500 (0) - /api/v1/last/50?site=remark - [rest/api/rest_public.go:234 api.(*public).lastCommentsCtrl]
remark42    | 2021/01/31 13:09:13.182 [INFO]  {logger/logger.go:122 logger.(*Middleware).Handler.func1.1} GET - /api/v1/last/50?site=remark - 36a8b0691a15 - 500 (83) - 409.051µs
remark42    | 2021/01/31 13:09:13.199 [INFO]  {logger/logger.go:122 logger.(*Middleware).Handler.func1.1} GET - /api/v1/config?site=remark - 36a8b0691a15 - 200 (381) - 171.988µs
remark42    | 2021/01/31 13:09:13.242 [DEBUG] {middleware/auth.go:69 middleware.(*Authenticator).auth.func1} auth failed, can't get token: token cookie was not presented: http: named cookie not present
remark42    | 2021/01/31 13:09:13.244 [DEBUG] {api/rest_public.go:74 api.(*public).findCommentsCtrl} get comments for {SiteID:remark URL:https://remark42.com/demo/}, sort -active, format tree, since 0001-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
remark42    | 2021/01/31 13:09:13.245 [INFO]  {logger/logger.go:122 logger.(*Middleware).Handler.func1.1} GET - /api/v1/find?site=remark&url=https://remark42.com/demo/&sort=-active&format=tree - 36a8b0691a15 - 200 (115) - 708.795µs
remark42    | 2021/01/31 13:09:22.960 [INFO]  {logger/logger.go:122 logger.(*Middleware).Handler.func1.1} POST - /api/v1/counts?site=remark - 505b5910118f - 200 (3) - 88.169µs - ["https://remark42.com/demo/"]

This should be working even if it's the demo page. Correct?

[akellbl4]

Good to hear.

Yep it should work, I tried to fix it but as I see it isn't successful. I pay my attention it and will try to fix it in one of the next releases.

[criticalcake]

I changed my site id to remark, now the demo site is working fine. 👍

Unfortunately remark42 is still not displayed on my blog.
The Docker and Nginx logs look just fine. No Errors, no warnings.
Maybe I use the wrong directories?

/opt/remark42/docker-compose.yml
/mnt/vg1/mydomain.com/html/index.html (=> my blog)

server block for my website

root /mnt/vg1/mydomain.com/html;

location / {
   try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}

server block for remark42

        location / {
                proxy_redirect          off;
                proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                proxy_set_header        Host $http_host;
                proxy_pass              http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
                proxy_read_timeout      1m;
                proxy_connect_timeout   1m;
        }

Do I have to use root /mnt/vg1/mydomain.com/html; here too?

docker-compose.yml

        ports:
            - "127.0.0.1:8080:8080"

        environment:
            - REMARK_URL=https://remark42.mydomain.com
            - SECRET=**************
            - SITE=remark
            - STORE_TYPE=bolt
            - STORE_BOLT_PATH=/mnt/vg1/remark42/var/db
        ...
        volumes:
                - /mnt/vg1/remark42:/srv/var

Anything suspicious here?
Do I use the paths/directories like they are intended to?

[criticalcake]

Guys, remark42 is working fine now on my blog! 🎉 😃

After the demo page was working, I checked my frontend and recognized the following error:

Uncaught TypeError: window.remark_config is undefined
    a https://remark42.mydomain.com/web/embed.js:1
    126 https://remark42.mydomain.com/web/embed.js:1
    n https://remark42.mydomain.com/web/embed.js:1
    <anonymous> https://remark42.mydomain.com/web/embed.js:1
    <anonymous> https://remark42.mydomain.com/web/embed.js:1

In the script part of my html I used var remark42_config = ...
So I had to change this to var remark_config = ... (without 42). Now it works perfect!

Thank you very much for your kind help and professional support! 👏 👍
I will recommend your engine and write a blog post about it.

[criticalcake]

wait: Do I need to have the ngx_http_log_module installed?

[paskal]

It's impossible not to have it installed, it's part of the base nginx installation.