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This repository hosts code for two docker images maxking/mailman-core
and
maxking/mailman-web
both of which are meant to deploy GNU Mailman 3 in
a production environment.
Docker is a container ecosystem which can run containers on several
platforms. It consists of a tool called docker-compose which can be used to
run multi-container applications. This repository consists of a
docker-compose.yaml
file which is a set of
configurations that can be used to deploy the Mailman 3 Suite.
The tags for the images are assumed to be release versions for images. This is going to be somewhat common philosophy of distributing Container images where the images with same tags are usually updated with the new functionality.
Releases will follow the following rules:
-
Images tagged like A.B.C will never change. If you want to pin down versions of Images, use these tags.
-
Images tagged with A.B will correspond to the latest A.B.C version released. Releases in A.B series are supposed to be backwards compatible i.e. any existing installation should not break when upgrading between subversions of A.B.C. So, if you want the latest updates and want to frequently update your installation without having to change the version numbers, you can use this.
-
Any changes in the Mailman components of the Images will cause a bump in the Minor version i.e. A.(B+1) will have one (and only one) updated Mailman component from A.B. Also, significant change in functionality, that might change how Images work or how people interact with the containers, can also cause a bump in the minor version.
-
Major versions will change either when there are backwards incompatible changes or when the releases reach a certain set milestone.
All the releases are signed and can be verified using Docker Content
Trust. To make sure that your docker client actually verifies these
signatures, you can enable Docker's content trust by setting an environment
variable DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST
. In bash/zsh you can try this:
$ export DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST=1
Or, alternatively, you can do this on a per-command basis without setting the environment variable above. For example, when pulling an image:
$ docker pull --disable-content-trust=false maxking/mailman-core:release
The above command will fail if the release tag doesn't exist or is not signed.
- Docker
- Docker-compose
To run this you first need to download docker for whichever operating system you are using. You can find documentation about how to install. It is recomended to use these instead of the one from your package managers. After you have downloaded and installed docker, install docker-compose from here.
Most of the common configuration is handled through environment variables in the
docker-compose.yaml
. However, there is need for some extra configuration that
interacts directly with the application. There are two configuration files on
the host that interact directly with Mailman's settings. These files exist on
the host running the containers and are imported at runtime in the containers.
-
/opt/mailman/core/mailman-extra.cfg
: This is the configuration for Mailman Core and anything that you add here will be added to Core's configuration. You need to restart your mailman-core container for the changes in this file to take effect. -
/opt/mailman/web/settings_local.py
: This is the Django configuration that is imported by the existing configuration provided by the mailman-web container. To change or override any settings in Django, you need to edit this file.
Also, note that if you need any other files to be accessible from the host to inside the container, you can place them at certain directories which are mounted inside the containers.
/opt/mailman/core
in host maps to/opt/mailman/
in mailman-core container./opt/mailman/web
in host maps to/opt/mailman-web-data
in mailman-web container.
These are the settings that you MUST change before deploying:
-
SERVE_FROM_DOMAIN
: The domain name from which Django will be served. To be added toALLOWED_HOSTS
in django settings. Default value is not set. This also replaces Django's defaultexample.com
SITE and becomes the default SITE (with SITE_ID=1). -
HYPERKITTY_API_KEY
: Hyperkitty's API Key, should be set to the same value as set for the mailman-core. -
MAILMAN_ADMIN_USER
: The username for the admin user to be created by default. -
MAILMAN_ADMIN_EMAIL
: The email for the admin user to be created by default. -
SECRET_KEY
: Django's secret key, mainly used for signing cookies and others.
For more details on how to configure this image, please look at Mailman-web's Readme
These are the variables that you MUST change before deploying:
-
HYPERKITTY_API_KEY
: Hyperkitty's API Key, should be set to the same value as set for the mailman-core. -
DATABASE_URL
: URL of the typedriver://user:password@hostname:port/databasename
for the django to use. If not set, the default is set tosqlite:///opt/mailman-web-data/mailmanweb.db
. The standard docker-compose.yaml comes with it set to a postgres database. There is no need to change this if you are happy with PostgreSQL. -
DATABASE_TYPE
: Its value can be one ofsqlite
,postgres
ormysql
as these are the only three database types that Mailman 3 supports. Its default value is set tosqlite
along with the default database class and default database url above. -
DATABASE_CLASS
: Default value ismailman.database.sqlite.SQLiteDatabase
. The values for this can be found in the mailman's documentation here.
For more details on how to configure this image, please look Mailman-core's Readme
While the above configuration will allow you to run the images and possible view the Web Frontend, it won't be functional until it is fully configured to to send emails.
To configure the mailman-web container to send emails, see these configuration settings.
To configure the mailman-core container to send emails, see the Setting you MTA section below.
To run the containers, simply run:
$ mkdir -p /opt/mailman/core
$ mkdir -p /opt/mailman/web
$ git clone https://github.com/maxking/docker-mailman
$ cd docker-mailman
# Change some configuration variables as mentioned above.
$ docker-compose up -d
Note that the web frontend in the mailman-web container is, by default, only
configured to serve dynamic content. Anything static like stylesheets etc is
expected to be served directly by the web server. The static content exists at
/opt/mailman/web/static
and should be aliased to /static/
in the web
server configuration.
See the nginx configuration as an example.
This command will do several things, most importantly:
-
Run a wsgi server using
uwsgi
for the Mailman's Django based web frontend listening on http://172.19.199.3:8000/. It will run 2 worker processes with 4 threads each. You may want to change the settingALLOWED_HOSTS
in the settings before deploying the application in production. -
Run a PostgreSQL server with a default database, username and password as mentioned in the
docker-compose.yaml
. You will have to change configuration files too if you change any of these. -
Run mailman-core listening an LMTP server at http://172.19.199.2:8024/ for messages from MTA. You will have to configure your MTA to send messages at this address.
Some more details about what the above system achieves is mentioned below. If you are only going to deploy a simple configuration, you don't need to read this. However, these are very easy to understand if you know how docker works.
-
First create a bridge network called
mailman
in thedocker-compose.yaml
. It will probably be named something else in your machine, but it will use the172.19.199.0/24
as subnet. All the containers mentioned (mailman-core, mailman-web, database) will join this network and are assigned static IPs. The host operating system is available at172.19.199.1
from within these containers. -
Spin off mailman-core container which has a static IP address of
172.19.199.2
in the mailman bridge network created above. It has GNU Mailman 3 core running inside it. Mailman core's REST API is available at port 8001 and LMTP server listens at port 8024. -
Spin off mailman-web container which has a Django application running with both Mailman's web frontend Postorius and Mailman's web-based Archiver running. Uwsgi server is used to run a web server with the configuration provided in this repository here. You may want to change the setting
ALLOWED_HOSTS
in the settings before deploying the application in production. You can do that by adding a/opt/mailman/web/settings_local.py
which is imported by the Django when running. -
Spin off a PostgreSQL database container which is used by both mailman-core and mailman-web as their primary database.
-
mailman-core mounts
/opt/mailman/core
from host OS at/opt/mailman
in the container. Mailman's var directory is stored there so that it is accessible from the host operating system. Configuration for Mailman core is generated on every run from the environment variables provided. Extra configuration can also be provided at/opt/mailman/core/mailman-extra.cfg
(on host), and will be added to generated configuration file. Mailman also needs another configuration file called mailman-hyperkitty.cfg and is also expected to be at/opt/mailman/core/
on the host OS. -
mailman-web mounts
/opt/mailman/web
from the host OS to/opt/mailman-web-data
in the container. It consists of the logs and settings_local.py file for Django. -
database mounts
/opt/mailman/database
at/var/lib/postgresql/data
so that PostgreSQL can persist its data even if the database containers are updated/changed/removed.
The provided docker containers do not have an MTA in-built. You can either run your own MTA inside a container and have them relay emails to the mailman-core container or just install an MTA on the host and have them relay emails.
To use Exim4, it should be setup to relay emails from 172.19.199.3
and
172.19.199.2
. The mailman specific configuration is provided in the repository
at core/assets/exim
. There are three files
-
25_mm_macros to be placed at
/etc/exim4/conf.d/main/25_mm3_macros
in a typical Debian install of exim4. Please change MY_DOMAIN_NAME to the domain name that will be used to serve mailman. Multi-domain setups will be added later. -
455_mm3_router to be placed at
/etc/exim4/conf.d/main/455_mm3_router
in a typical Debian install of exim4. -
55_mm3_transport to be placed at
/etc/exim4/conf.d/main/55_mm3_transport
in a typical Debian install of exim4.
Also, the default configuration inside the mailman-core image has the MTA set to Exim, but just for reference, it looks like this:
# mailman.cfg
[mta]
incoming: mailman.mta.exim4.LMTP
outgoing: mailman.mta.deliver.deliver
lmtp_host: $MM_HOSTNAME
lmtp_port: 8024
smtp_host: $SMTP_HOST
smtp_port: $SMTP_PORT
configuration: python:mailman.config.exim4
To use Postfix, it should be set up to relay emails from
172.19.199.2
and 172.19.199.3
. The mailman specific configuration is
mentioned below which you should add to you main.cf
configuration file,
which is typically at /etc/postfix/main.cf
on Debian based operating
systems:
# main.cf
# Support the default VERP delimiter.
recipient_delimiter = +
unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550
owner_request_special = no
transport_maps =
regexp:/opt/mailman/core/var/data/postfix_lmtp
local_recipient_maps =
regexp:/opt/mailman/core/var/data/postfix_lmtp
relay_domains =
regexp:/opt/mailman/core/var/data/postfix_domains
To configure Mailman to use Postfix, add the following to mailman-extra.cfg
at
/opt/mailman/core/mailman-extra.cfg
.
# mailman-extra.cfg
[mta]
incoming: mailman.mta.postfix.LMTP
outgoing: mailman.mta.deliver.deliver
lmtp_host: 172.19.199.2
lmtp_port: 8024
smtp_host: 172.19.199.1
smtp_port: 25
configuration: /etc/postfix-mailman.cfg
The configuration file /etc/postfix-mailman.cfg
is generated automatically.
It is advisable to run your Django (interfaced through WSGI server) through an actual webserver in production for better performance.
If you are using v0.1.0, the uwsgi server is configured to listen to requests at
172.19.199.3:8000
using HTTP
protocol. Make sure that you preserve the HOST
header when you proxy the requests from your Web Server. In Nginx, you can do
that by adding the following to your configuration:
# Nginx configuration.
location / {
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
proxy_pass http://172.19.199.3:8000;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
}
Make sure you are using proxy_pass
for HTTP
protocol.
Starting from v0.1.1, the uwsgi server is configured to listen to requests at
172.19.199.3:8000
with the http protocol and 172.19.199.3:8080
for the uwsgi
protocol.
It is advised to use the uwsgi protocol as it has better performance. Both Apache and Nginx have native support for uwsgi protocol through plugins which are generally included in the distro packages.
To move to uwsgi protocol in the above nginx configuration use this
# Nginx configuration.
location / {
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
uwsgi_pass 172.19.199.3:8080;
include uwsgi_params;
uwsgi_read_timeout 300;
}
Please make sure that you are using v0.1.1 if you use this configuration.
SSL Certificates from Lets Encrypt need to be renewed every 90 days. You can
setup a cron job to do the job. I have this small shell script(certbot-renew.sh)
that you can put up in /etc/cron.monthly
to get the job done.
#! /bin/bash
cd /opt/letsencrypt/
./certbot-auto --config /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/MY_DOMAIN_NAME.conf certonly
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
ERRORLOG=`tail /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log`
echo -e "The Let's Encrypt cert has not been renewed! \n \n" \
$ERRORLOG
else
nginx -s reload
fi
exit 0
Please do not forget to make the script executable (chmod +x certbot-renew.sh).
This repository is licensed under MIT License. Please see the LICENSE file for more details.