My OpenBSD Home Server "Phobos2"

Page started: 2025-08-30
Draft!
 This page is a draft and may be incomplete, incorrect, or just a stub or outline. I've decided to allow myself to put draft pages on my website as an experiment. I'm hoping they will:
  • Help me address my backlog of article ideas.
  • Serve as a "living" TODO list of things to work on.
  • Be useful to myself or others in their incomplete forms.
As always, I'm happy to accept feedback on anything I publish including draft content.

Notes for my OpenBSD setup. Work in progress as I transition my Slackware linux home setup to OpenBSD.

Functions:

Initial setup

I don’t have much here yet. Standard install (hit Enter a lot).

Setup doas for the wheel group.

Packages

Adding OpenBSD packages really couldn’t be much easier:

pkg_add vim

  • vim - I can use the nvi that ships with OpenBSD, but I’m used to Vim.

  • colorls - I do find coloring the output of things like directories to be useful.

  • ruby - I use Ruby quite a bit as a general-purpose scripting language. I’m trying out 3.4.2 and I followed the instructions after adding to make a bunch of symlinks to make it the default system ruby.

TODO: keeping this list on pg 25 of desk notebook

Some nice things

add some pretty colors with ksh PS1 customization and colorls

I started here:

https://nanxiao.me/en/customize-ksh-display-for-openbsd/

And then constumized until I had something that felt familiar and comfortable:

# pretty colors
export PS1='\033[34m\h:\w\$\033[0m '
export LSCOLORS=fxexcxdxbxegedabagacad
alias ls='colorls -G'

TODO: this should be on a separate page: In fact, I’m thinking this whole thing ought to be a collection of pages, really!

httpd









Viewing with $ cat /etc/httpd.conf:








# After changes, test with:
#
#   doas httpd -n
#
# Then soft restart with:
#
#   doas rcctl reload httpd
#

# ============================================================================
# Catch-all for computer - this is the catch-all because it comes first in the
# list: "If a request does not match any server name, it is handled by the
# first defined server section that matches the listening port."
# ============================================================================
server "phobos2" {
    listen on * port 80

    location "*.php" {
        fastcgi socket "/run/php-fpm.sock"
    }
}


# =============================================
# fam-test.ratfactor.com
# =============================================
server "fam-test.ratfactor.com" {
    listen on * port 80

    # Relative to the chroot of /var/www/
    root "/htdocs/famsite"
    directory index "index.php"

    location "*.php" {
            fastcgi socket "/run/php-fpm.sock"
    }

    # allow huge images (giant nasa nebula PNG is 30Mb)
    #                 in bytes:  M  K  B
    connection max request body 50000000
}








Set directory permissions:








phobos2$ doas chown dave /var/www/htdocs








That’s it. The perms look like this:








drwxr-xr-x  4 dave  daemon  512 Sep  6 19:28 htdocs








I was able to create a test htdocs/index.html without changing anything
else and serve it from httpd no problem.










PHP, php-fpm








$ doas pkg_add php








I selected v8.4 from the choices. The OpenBSD PHP package comes with PHP-FPM.






Start up php-fpm:








phobos2:~$ rcctl ls off | ag php
php84_fpm
phobos2:~$ man rcctl
phobos2:~$ doas rcctl enable php84_fpm
phobos2:~$ doas rcctl start php84_fpm
php84_fpm(ok)








Note that PHP errors end up in the httpd error log:








$ tail /var/www/logs/error.log








SQLite3 plus PHP’s PDO driver for Sqlite3:








$ doas pkg_add sqlite3 php-pdo_sqlite-8.4.12








If you try to use it now, you’ll get:








PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught PDOException: could not find driver








Since the driver is installed, this error is due to the driver module
not having been enabled in php.ini. The OpenBSD package has provided
a sample file. It just needs to be copied to the php config directory.
PHP-FPM will need to be restarted to pick up this change.








phobos2:~$ doas cp /etc/php-8.4.sample/pdo_sqlite.ini /etc/php-8.4/
phobos2:~$ doas rcctl restart php84_fpm
php84_fpm(ok)
php84_fpm(ok)








File permissions are really important for getting any database files
writeable. I put mine in a new data/ directory outside of htdocs/
but inside the chroot for httpd.






In short, I’ve chosen to make myself the owner and allow read/write
for the www group.






Here’s the magic sauce to create the new data directory:








$ cd /var/www
$ doas mkdir data
$ doas chown dave data
$ doas chgrp www data
$ chmod g+w data








And here’s creating the SQLite3 database:








$ cd /var/www/data
$ sqlite3 foo.db
sqlite> .read my-new-db-script.sql
...
$ doas chgrp www foo.db
$ chmod g+w foo.db








End result:








$ cd /var/www
$ ls -l
...
drwxrwxr-x   2 dave  www     512 Sep  6 20:54 data

$ cd data
$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r--  1 dave  www  16384 Sep  6 20:54 famsite.db








And my PHP application can now write to it!