SeAT

Manual Installation¶

This guide attempts to explain how to manually install SeAT onto an Ubuntu Server. A small amount of Linux experience is preferred when it comes to this guide, although it is not entirely mandatory.

Info

This guide has been written targetting Ubuntu. However, you can use it to deploy SeAT on any linux distribution. Just be sure you adapt commands to targetted distribution (mostly those related to the package manager).

Hint

Before starting to do anything, be sure you read the complete workflow once. It will help you to understand all steps from the installation process.

Eve Application and ESI

SeAT consumes CCP's ESI service in order to retrieve EVE Online related information. Before you can make any authenticated calls to ESI, you have to register a third party EVE application on the developers portal. This is an absolute must for SeAT to be of any use. The configuration of this step is covered in a later stage of the documentation.

Getting started¶

We are going to assume you have root access to a fresh Ubuntu Server. Typically access is gained via SSH. All of the below commands are to be entered in the SSH terminal session for the installation & configuration of SeAT. If the server you want to install SeAT on is being used for other things too (such as hosting MySQL databases and or websites), then please keep that in mind while following this guide.

Packages are installed using the aptitude package manager as the root user.

OS Installation¶

Operating System¶

Before we get to installing SeAT, lets ensure that your operating system is up to date. We can do that with basics :

apt-get update to refresh the repositories cache.
apt-get full-upgrade to update any installed packages.
reboot in order to ensure any updated software is the current running version.
apt-get autoremove (after the reboot) to cleanup any unneeded packages.

Database¶

SeAT relies heavily on a database to function. Everything it learns is stored here, along with things such as user accounts for your users. It comes without saying that database security is a very important aspect too. So, ensure that you choose very strong passwords for your installation where required.

SeAT officially supports just MariaDB. Using MySQL or PostreSQL might appear to work on the surface, however it is likely that you will run into issues due to differences between the databases later down the line, and almost no testing with them is done during development.

We need to ensure that we have the latest MariaDB installed. To help with this, MariaDB provides an official repository to get the latest versions.

To download and install the repo, you need curl. Install it with:

apt-get install curl

Let's add this repository with:

curl -sS https://downloads.mariadb.com/MariaDB/mariadb_repo_setup | bash

With the repository now setup, lets install the database server:

Warning

During the installation, you may be asked to set a password for the root MariaDB user account. Make sure you set a long, strong password and remember it. It will be needed for the next step.

apt-get install mariadb-server

Before we can configure the database, we have to start it:

systemctl enable mariadb.service

Next, we are going to secure the database server by removing anonymous access and setting a root password (if you have not been prompted for it yet).

Note

The database root password should not be confused with the operating systems root passwords. They are both completely different. They should also not have the same password.

To secure the database, run:

mariadb-secure-installation

This will ask you a series of questions where you should generally just answer yes to. If you already set a root password in the previous step then you dont have to set it again, otherwise, make sure you choose a long, strong password for the root account. An example run is shown below:

[...]

Enter current password for root (enter for none):  IF ONE WAS SET, IGNORE THIS
OK, successfully used password, moving on...

[...]

Set root password? [Y/n] y
New password:             SET A STRONG PASSWORD HERE
Re-enter new password:    SET A STRONG PASSWORD HERE
Password updated successfully!
Reloading privilege tables..
 ... Success!

[...]

Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
 ... Success!

[...]

Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
 ... Success!

[...]

Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y

[...]

Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
 ... Success!

[...]

That concludes the installation of the database server and securing it.

Next, we need to create an actual user and database for SeAT to use on the newly installed server. To do this we use the mariadb command line client and enter a few commands as the root user to create the database and the user that will be accessing the server. Let get to it.

Fire up the mariadb client as root by running:

mariadb -uroot -p

This will prompt you for a password. Use the password you configured for the root account when we ran mysql_secure_installation. This will most probably be the last time you need to use this password :)

If the password was correct, you should see a prompt similar to the one below:

root@ubuntu:~# mysql -uroot -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 16
Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

MariaDB [(none)]>

Create a new database for SeAT to use with:

create database seat;

The output should be similar to the below:

MariaDB [(none)]> create database seat;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

Next, we need to create the user that SeAT itself will use to connect and use the new seat database:

GRANT ALL ON seat.* to seat@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 's_p3rs3c3r3tp455w0rd';

Of course, you need to replace s_p3rs3c3r3tp455w0rd with your own unique and strong password. Successfully running this should present you with output similar to the below:

MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON seat.* to seat@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 's_p3rs3c3r3tp455w0rd';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

In the example above, we have effectively declared that SeAT will be using the database as seat:s_p3rs3c3r3tp455w0rd@localhost/seat.

Finally, we will flush the database server privileges:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

That concludes the database server setup. You can exit the prompt with exit;

Note

Remember the password for the seat database user as we will need it later to configure SeAT.

PHP¶

Since SeAT is written primarily in PHP, we will need to install PHP packages. Ubuntu based systems can make use of the ondrej PPA which is a very popular repository used for specific PHP versions.

Depending on the version of Ubuntu you are using, a release specific repository URL should be used for the PPA. Select the tab applicable to your Ubuntu version and run the commands within.

Jammy 22.04Focal 20.04Bionic 18.04

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ondrej/php/ubuntu jammy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ondrej/php/ubuntu jammy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ondrej/php/ubuntu focal main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ondrej/php/ubuntu focal main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ondrej/php/ubuntu bionic main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ondrej/php/ubuntu bionic main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list

Next, we will have to download the new repositories GPG signing key and add it into our keychain

apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 4F4EA0AAE5267A6C

With the new repository configured, update the package lists with:

apt-get update

Finally, install the required PHP packages with:

apt-get install libpng-dev libfreetype6-dev libjpeg-dev
apt-get install openssl zip php8.2-bz2 php8.2-cli php8.2-curl php8.2-dom php8.2-gd php8.2-gmp php8.2-intl php8.2-mbstring php8.2-mysql php8.2-opcache php8.2-redis php8.2-zip

Redis¶

SeAT makes use of Redis as a cache and message broker for the Queue back end. Installing it is really easy. Do it with:

apt-get install redis-server

Hint

By default, redis is making backup from its database - so it ensure integrity in case of failure. However, in certain condition, like power outage, this backup might be unprocessable and avoid redis to run.

Since we don't store anything critical in it, you may want to disable this. To do so, edit the configuration file using nano /etc/redis/redis.conf and search line appendonly no, change it for appendonly yes

If you are on a small server, You may also want to limit the part of memory used by redis (by default, it will consume all available memory). To do so, into the redis configuration file, search line # maxmemory <bytes> and change it for maxmemory xGB where x is the memory limit you want to set.

You might also need to start redis:

systemctl enable redis-server.service

SeAT Installation¶

Prerequisites¶

Excellent progress! All of the operating system level requirements are now met and we are almost ready to install SeAT itself. The only thing that is outstanding is the package manager called composer as well as the git client. The combination of composer and git will let us download the SeAT source code from Github and install it locally.

Git¶

Install git with:

apt-get install git

Composer¶

Next, install composer with:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer && hash -r

Thats it. Lets install SeAT! By default, we suggest you run SeAT from within /var/www/seat. As part of the installation, the seat directory will be created for us, but we will need to create /var/www for now as we have not yet configured the web server.

Create the www directory with:

mkdir -p /var/www

Next, cd to the new /var/www directory with:

cd /var/www

SeAT Download¶

With all of the prerequisites installed as well as our www directory ready we can finally download SeAT. Do that with:

composer create-project eveseat/seat:5.0 --no-dev --no-interaction

Once the download is done, you should have seen output such as:

Writing lock file
Generating optimized autoload files
> Illuminate\Foundation\ComposerScripts::postAutoloadDump
> @php artisan package:discover
Discovered Package: darkaonline/l5-swagger
Discovered Package: eveseat/api
Discovered Package: eveseat/console
Discovered Package: eveseat/eveapi
Discovered Package: eveseat/notifications
Discovered Package: eveseat/services
Discovered Package: eveseat/web
Package manifest generated successfully.
> @php artisan key:generate
Application key [base64:CmhqYNkaIcHo8nYC8LiEWa3U5/+BiTLih5dZftxlV2k=] set successfully.

Permissions¶

You may have noticed a warning about composer running as root. For now this can be safely ignored. Post the installation of the SeAT source code, we need to fix up the permissions of the downloaded files. Do that with:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/seat
chmod -R guo+w /var/www/seat/storage/

This will ensure that the web server, cron jobs and workers have access to the source code as well as logs.

SeAT Setup¶

With SeAT downloaded, we need to configure it. There are a number of configuration tasks needed. These include editing the applications .env file as well as running some commands that setup and seed the database. A configuration value reference can be found here.

.env setup¶

The first task would be to configure the applications database connection. Open the file located at /var/www/seat/.env with something like vi or nano and update the database options with your values. Typically, only the password would really need to be updated. If you are making use of an existing database somewhere else over the network, update the applicable fields such as DB_HOST accordingly.

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=seat
DB_USERNAME=seat
DB_PASSWORD=s_p3rs3c3r3tp455w0rd # <-- this is the value you probably need to edit.
DB_DEBUG=false

Database Migrations and Seeds¶

Next we need to publish the database migrations and web assets (such as JavaScript scripts and CSS Style sheets), run those migrations and finally seed the SeAT job schedule.

Publish the assets and database migrations with:

sudo -H -u www-data bash -c 'php /var/www/seat/artisan vendor:publish --force --all'

Run the database migrations with:

sudo -H -u www-data bash -c 'php /var/www/seat/artisan migrate'

Seed the SeAT schedule with:

sudo -H -u www-data bash -c 'php /var/www/seat/artisan db:seed --class=Seat\\Services\\Database\\Seeders\\PluginDatabaseSeeder'

EVE Sde Update¶

SeAT makes use of a number of tables from the EVE Static Data Exports. MariaDB conversions of this data is available at https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/dump/ and used in SeAT.

To update to the latest SDE within SeAT, run:

sudo -H -u www-data bash -c 'php /var/www/seat/artisan eve:update:sde'

Supervisor¶

The jobs ecosystem within SeAT requires a process supervisor to ensure that the job runner stays alive. The job runner itself is implemented using Laravel Horizon and is monitored using supervisord.

To configure the Horizon process monitor, first install supervisor:

apt-get install supervisor

Next, we will create a dedicated configuration file which will ask supervisor to keep an eye on Horizon. This file will live in /etc/supervisor/conf.d/seat.conf. Create this file with its recommended configuration with:

cat > /etc/supervisor/conf.d/seat.conf << EOL
[program:seat]
command=/usr/bin/php /var/www/seat/artisan horizon
process_name = %(program_name)s-80%(process_num)02d
stdout_logfile = /var/log/seat-80%(process_num)02d.log
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=100MB
stdout_logfile_backups=10
numprocs=1
directory=/var/www/seat
stopwaitsecs=600
user=www-data
EOL

Finally, reload supervisor to apply the new configuration with the following command:

systemctl enable supervisor.service

Crontab¶

A crontab entry is needed for SeAT. While simple in implementation, this crontab entry simply helps the application invoke a job checker very minute. The actual schedule is stored within SeAT itself and managed entirely via the Web Interface.

To configure the crontab entry required for SeAT, run the following commands:

echo '* * * * * php /var/www/seat/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1' > /tmp/seat-crontab.tmp

Next, add this crontab for the www-data user with:

crontab -u www-data /tmp/seat-crontab.tmp

If you want to confirm that the crontab successfully installed, you can check it with crontab -u www-data -l.

Web Server¶

Almost there!

You almost made it to the end! Just one more step.

The SeAT web interface requires a web server to serve the HTML goodies it has. We highly recommend you to use nginx and will be covered in this document. You don't have to use it, so if you prefer something else, feel free.

Nginx Install¶

Together with an nginx installation we also need to install php-fpm to handle the PHP execution for us. Let's install nginx and php-fpm with:

apt-get install nginx php8.2-fpm

Nginx Configuration¶

With the webserver installed, we need to configure nginx to serve SeAT. For that, a configuration file needs to be created that will tell nginx where to find php-fpm as well as where the assets are for SeAT.

The configuration file will live at /etc/nginx/sites-available/seat. It can be created with the following command:

cat > /etc/nginx/sites-available/seat << EOL
server {

    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    # If you are hosting this instance on a domain, set that
    # name here.
    #server_name  seat.yourdomain.com;

    # SeAT public directory. This is the only directory that
    # should be exposed by the webserver. If one has to expose
    # the parent directory then things like the .env file will
    # be available for anyone to download.
    root /var/www/seat/public;

    index index.php;

    location / {
       try_files \$uri \$uri/ /index.php?\$query_string;
    }

    # PHP-FPM configuration.
    location ~ \.php\$ {
       try_files \$uri /index.php =404;
       fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
       fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME \$document_root\$fastcgi_script_name;
       include fastcgi_params;
    }

    # Even though .htaccess rules mean nothing in the nginx
    # world, prevent those from being downloaded anyways.
    location ~ /\.ht {
       deny all;
    }

    # In case someone messes up, prevent .env files from
    # being downloaded as well.
    location ~ /\.env {
       deny all;
    }
}
EOL

Warning

The code block above should not be copied directly into a file. It is a script and should be pasted directly into the linux terminal. It will create the nginx config for you. If you create the file yourself with the above content then the file will not be valid and you will receive errors from nginx.

The configuration file as is at /etc/nginx/sites-available/seat itself won't be loaded by nginx yet. Storing configuration files in a *sites-available* directory is simply a convention used to allow administrators to quickly add & remove sites if needed. To apply the changes made by the new configuration file it needs to be symlinked to a *sites-enabled* directory.

Let's symlink to the new configuration and drop the default one as a hardening exercise at the same time:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/seat /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/seat
rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Finally, reload nginx and php-fpm for the new changes to take affect:

systemctl restart nginx.service
systemctl restart php8.2-fpm.service

ESI Configuration¶

As mentioned at the start of the guide, it is necessary for you to configure ESI. For instructions how to do this, please refer to the ESI Setup Guide.

Info

You may want to serve your SeAT installation over SSL (using HTTPS) - which is a recommanded behavior. There are many way to do it, you can have a look on Let's Encrypt which provide you valid certificates for free. Put an eye to their Certbot Documentation.

Success

You made it! Use a browser and browse to the IP address / hostname of your server to access SeAT!