It’s been about two weeks since the initial release of powRSS.com and the fediverse community has given it a welcome reception.

The app is currently running on Sinatra, but this weekend I’ve been doing a rewrite to Rails to redo the software architecture and have support for future features.

As this is the first time I self-host a Rails app, I want to take notes for reference.

The Server

I’m going with Hetzner. It’s what I’m using for powRSS now (which shares a server with this very blog) but I’ll be spinning up a new server for the Rails app alone. Same specs as last time.

First step was logging in via SSH, updating, upgrading packages, and rebooting the system.

New User

Next, I created a non-root user to enact the principle of least privilege:

$ adduser [username]

After providing a new password for the user, I gave it sudo privileges and logged out.

Next I created .ssh/authorized_keys in the server and updated my local .ssh/config file so I could login via SSH.

Disable Password Login

To disable password login I edited /etc/ssh/sshd_config as sudo and set PasswordAuthentication to no and uncommented PubkeyAuthentication and set it to yes.

Dokku

To install Dokku and followed my notes from last month.