I recently started playing with Logseq, an open source knowledge management application. Prior to that, I had tried Obsidian, which is also a very nice application. However, unlike Logseq, Obsidian is not fully open source. It follows a freemium model. In any case, something I wanted to change right away is the default format for the date entries on the journal. I wanted it to show the day of the week, which it doesn't do by default. After searching around for a few minutes, I found this page with a JavaScript snippet that implemented it just fine. {link to this entry}

More on my personal project to self-host as of the services I use as I can. In this case, it's the server for taskwarrior, a very useful command line based task management tool. There are freely available services out there but, as far as I can tell, they are run by volunteers and, from time to time they are discontinued, or simply fail for a day or two. The official directions to configure the taskwarrior server can be found here. However, once more, they didn't work as expected for me. I had to make some changes. Truly, the directions from the Arch Linux Wiki were much better, I think. So, here are the steps I followed:

# apt install taskd

# export TASKDDATA=/var/lib/taskd

(Edit the file /usr/share/taskd/pki/vars. In particular, ensure the value of CN matches the server's hostname or IP address).

# cd /usr/share/taskd/pki

# ./generate

(This will create the self-generated certificates for your server).

# cp *pem /var/lib/taskd/

# vi /etc/taskd/config

client.cert=/var/lib/taskd/client.cert.pem
client.key=/var/lib/taskd/client.key.pem
server.cert=/var/lib/taskd/server.cert.pem
server.key=/var/lib/taskd/server.key.pem
server.crl=/var/lib/taskd/server.crl.pem
ca.cert=/var/lib/taskd/ca.cert.pem

# chown Debian-taskd:Debian-taskd ca.cert.pem ca.key.pem server.cert.pem server.crl.pem server.key.pem

# chmod 400 ca.cert.pem ca.key.pem server.cert.pem server.crl.pem server.key.pem

# touch /var/log/taskd.log

# chown Debian-taskd:Debian-taskd /var/log/taskd.log

# taskd config --force log /var/log/taskd.log

# taskd add org [group]

# taskd add user [group] [username]

# chown -R Debian-taskd:Debian-taskd /var/lib/taskd/orgs

# systemctl start taskd

# cd /usr/share/taskd/pki

# ./generate.client [username]

(Copy the files "[username].key.pem", "[username].cert.pem" and "ca.cert.pem" to the taskwarrior client).

(Configure the taskwarrior client following the usual instructions).

In my case, since firewalld was configured on the server, I also had to open the port on firewalld to allow the client(s) to connect. {link to this entry}

Recently, I decided I was going to self-host as many services as possible. Yes, relying on a free service in the cloud is tempting. But one never knows when the vendor is going to change the terms & conditions, start charging or, as it recently happened in the case of Mint, simply discontinue the service and leave one scrambling for a quick replacement. In addition to this, there are also privacy considerations to take into account, of course. One way or another, I made the decision to migrate away from Feedly for my RSS feeds. After doing some research reading about the different options available to me, I decided to settle on miniflux. It's simple, clean, easy to self-host, and it allows me to use it both from the computer and a mobile app (well, actually, what I do is to appify the website via Firefox). Now, when it comes to the instructions to install the software, everything looked pretty straightforward in principle. The miniflux project itself documents the steps here. However, as it often happens with open source projects, it didn't take long before I ran into some issues, differences and idiosincracies. So, I searched around some more, and found these other instructions. Yet, those didn't work as expected either. In the end, I had to come up with a combination of those two, some other information I found online and my own guesses. The following worked:

# apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

# su - postgres

$ createuser -P miniflux
Enter password for new role: ******
Enter it again: ******

$ createdb -O miniflux miniflux

# wget https://github.com/miniflux/v2/releases/download/2.0.49/miniflux_2.0.49_amd64.deb

# apt install ./miniflux_2.0.49_amd64.deb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'miniflux' instead of './miniflux_2.0.49_amd64.deb'
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  miniflux
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/5197 kB of archives.
After this operation, 20.2 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 /root/sw/miniflux_2.0.49_amd64.deb miniflux amd64 2.0.49 [5197 kB]
Selecting previously unselected package miniflux.
(Reading database ... 48956 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../sw/miniflux_2.0.49_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking miniflux (2.0.49) ...
Setting up miniflux (2.0.49) ...

Configuration file '/etc/miniflux.conf'
 ==> File on system created by you or by a script.
 ==> File also in package provided by package maintainer.
   What would you like to do about it ?  Your options are:
    Y or I  : install the package maintainer's version
    N or O  : keep your currently-installed version
      D     : show the differences between the versions
      Z     : start a shell to examine the situation
 The default action is to keep your current version.
*** miniflux.conf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ? Y
Installing new version of config file /etc/miniflux.conf ...
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/miniflux.service → /lib/systemd/system/miniflux.service.
Could not execute systemctl:  at /usr/bin/deb-systemd-invoke line 145.
Processing triggers for man-db (2.11.2-2) ...
N: Download is performed unsandboxed as root as file '/root/sw/miniflux_2.0.49_amd64.deb' couldn't be accessed \
by user '_apt'. - pkgAcquire::Run (13: Permission denied)

$ psql miniflux -c 'create extension hstore'
CREATE EXTENSION

# sudo -u postgres psql miniflux
could not change directory to "/root": Permission denied
psql (15.3 (Debian 15.3-0+deb12u1))
Type "help" for help.

miniflux=# CREATE EXTENSION hstore;
ERROR:  extension "hstore" already exists

...skipping 1 line
# vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/miniflux

# Change miniflux.example.com with your domain
server {
    server_name     miniflux.example.com;
    listen          80;

    location / {
        proxy_pass  http://unix:/run/miniflux/miniflux.sock;
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

# ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/miniflux /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/miniflux

# certbot --non-interactive --redirect --agree-tos --nginx -d miniflux.sacredchaos.com -m jesus.ortega.segura@protonmail.com
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Requesting a certificate for miniflux.sacredchaos.com

Successfully received certificate.
Certificate is saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/miniflux.sacredchaos.com/fullchain.pem
Key is saved at:         /etc/letsencrypt/live/miniflux.sacredchaos.com/privkey.pem
This certificate expires on 2024-01-27.
These files will be updated when the certificate renews.
Certbot has set up a scheduled task to automatically renew this certificate in the background.

Deploying certificate
Successfully deployed certificate for miniflux.sacredchaos.com to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/miniflux.sacredchaos.com.conf
Congratulations! You have successfully enabled HTTPS on https://miniflux.sacredchaos.com

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If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:
 * Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt:   https://letsencrypt.org/donate
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# systemctl edit miniflux.service
[Service]
Environment="LISTEN_ADDR=x.x.x.x:8080"

{link to this entry}

Here is a short article explaining how to search for packages both in Debian and Ubuntu. Basically, you use either the apt search command or the apt-cache show command. The article explains the difference between those two. However, those only search for packages in the repos that you have configured. If you need to find packages in all repos, you can head to the packages website for either distribution. That's what I've always done. Except that this article also tells you about a simple dpkg-repo-query script that you can use to search for those too. Sort of nice. {link to this entry}