[2019-12-14] Installing Honk

I'm always searching to self-host anything I can. The other day I

stumbled upon Honk via

codevoid.de

Honk is a minimal ActivityPub server compatible with Mastodon for a

single user.

Honk homepage

I installed it on a small VPS server at ScaleWay which offers small

ARM instances for €2.99/month. So here is the datail on how I did it

if someone wants to setup a honk instance.

DISCLAIMER: My way to setup it is probably not the safest or the

cleanest so don't hesitate to contact me for improvements.

Server setup

I picked the smallest ARM instances which are plenty enough for such a

service. Chose Debian Buster as the OS, I would have chosen OpenBSD if

it was available but setup seems a bit hard and I wanted something

quick to test.

After the instance has booted, I ran the usuals apt update && apt

upgrade and rebooted the machine.

Honk is written in Go and stores its data in SQLite. We will also need

NGinx to serve it and certbot to have https.

```shell

$ sudo apt install golang sqlite libsqlite-dev nginx\

python-certbot-nginx git mercurial

```

Honk setup

Clone the mercurial honk repository:

```shell

$ hg clone https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk && cd honk && hg pull

```

To compile Honk run a simple make.

We then need to initialize Honk amd create your user:

```shell

$ ./honk init

username: (the username you want)

password: (the password you want)

listenaddr: /var/www/honk.sock

servername: honk.typed-hole.org

```

You can then start Honk:

```shell

$ ./honk

```

Serving Honk

Let's put Honk views in /var/www

```shell

$ ln -s /somewhere/honk/views /var/www/honk

```

And add the nginx config for Honk.

```/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/honk

server {

server_name honk.typed-hole.org;

root /var/www/honk;

access_log /var/log/nginx/honk.log;

error_log /var/log/nginx/honk.log;

location / {

proxy_pass http://unix:/var/www/honk.sock:;

proxy_set_header Host $http_host;

}

}

```

In order to have our Honk instance served under https we need to run

certbot.

```shell

$ certbot --nginx

```

which should append the necessary config to

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/honk. Pretty neat!

Reload nginx with:

```shell

$ service nginx reload

```

Having added the necessary entry in our DNS, you should be able to see

Honk web interface.

Honk systemd service

In order to auto-start Honk let's add a systemd service:

```/lib/systemd/system/honk.service

[Unit]

Description=Honk

ConditionPathExists=/path/to/honk/honk

After=network.target

[Service]

Type=simple

User=root

Group=root

LimitNOFILE=1024

Restart=on-failure

RestartSec=10

WorkingDirectory=/path/to/honk/

ExecStart=/path/to/honk/honk

make sure log directory exists and owned by syslog

PermissionsStartOnly=true

ExecStartPre=/bin/touch /var/log/honk.log

ExecStartPre=/bin/chmod 755 /var/log/honk.log

[Install]

WantedBy=multi-user.target

```

Then stop the running honk if any and start the service:

```shell

$ service honk start

```

Some security

We need to secure our installation with some firewall rules. UFW is

the uncomplicated firewall.

```shell

$ sudo apt install ufw

$ ufw allow 22 80 443

$ ufw default deny

$ ufw enable

```

Printing the rules should look like:

```shell

$ ufw status verbose

Status: active

Logging: on (low)

Default: deny (incoming), allow (outgoing), disabled (routed)

New profiles: skip

To Action From

-- ------ ----

22 ALLOW IN Anywhere

80 ALLOW IN Anywhere

443 ALLOW IN Anywhere

22 (v6) ALLOW IN Anywhere (v6)

80 (v6) ALLOW IN Anywhere (v6)

443 (v6) ALLOW IN Anywhere (v6)

```

That's about it, you should have a working Honk setup :)

I find Honk really nice so far, the web interface is really usable and

works on mobile too. Just beware of your disk space if you follow

image heavy accounts as all of these will be cached. It uses less than

200MB of RAM which is super light compared to the others.

Next I'd like to create a Gemini interface, that could be nice.

You can follow my account here

@julienxx@honk.typed-hole.org

If I made any mistakes or you have comments, don't hesitate to contact

me julien@typed-hole.org I'll hapilly fix them or help if I can.

Happy honking!

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