Ruby On Rails 7.0 on OpenBSD 7.0

Template for a minimalistic ultra-secure server setup for your Ruby On Rails apps.

Choose OpenBSD for your Unix needs. OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. An alternatve to the vulnerabilities and overengineering of Linux and its related network services such as NGiNX/Apache, OpenSSL, iptables/nftables, systemd, BIND, Postfix and much, much more. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax.

httpd(8) (PDF: brief intro) and acme-client(8) are for Let's Encrypt TLS-certificates and their ACME-challenges. relayd(8) does the reverse proxying and TLS-termination, and behind all that is Ruby On Rails' Puma webserver, managed by rc.subr(8) system startup scripts. nsd(8) does the DNS, and pf(8) the firewalling.

As root

Edit config files to taste, then copy them to root:

cp -R etc/ /
cp -R var/ /

Add packages:

pkg_add zsh ruby postgresql-server node redis sass

Symlinks from Ruby's post-install message:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/ruby30 /usr/local/bin/ruby
ln -s /usr/local/bin/erb30 /usr/local/bin/erb
ln -s /usr/local/bin/irb30 /usr/local/bin/irb
ln -s /usr/local/bin/rdoc30 /usr/local/bin/rdoc
ln -s /usr/local/bin/ri30 /usr/local/bin/ri
ln -s /usr/local/bin/rake30 /usr/local/bin/rake
ln -s /usr/local/bin/gem30 /usr/local/bin/gem
ln -s /usr/local/bin/bundle30 /usr/local/bin/bundle
ln -s /usr/local/bin/bundler30 /usr/local/bin/bundler
ln -s /usr/local/bin/racc30 /usr/local/bin/racc
ln -s /usr/local/bin/racc2y30 /usr/local/bin/racc2y
ln -s /usr/local/bin/y2racc30 /usr/local/bin/y2racc

Nokogiri dependencies:

pkg_add libiconv libxml libxslt

Create unprivileged user and group myuser:

useradd -m -s /usr/local/bin/zsh myuser
passwd myuser

As unprivileged user

Make Bundler install gems locally:

bundle config set path /home/myuser/.bundle/

Set gem path:

echo "path+=(/home/myuser/.gem/ruby/3.0/bin)" >> ~/.zprofile
source ~/.zprofile

Install Rails, and make sure Nokogiri uses OpenBSD's packages when compiling:

gem install --user-install rails -- --use-system-libraries

Let's Encrypt HTTPS/TLS

Modify etc/acme-client.conf, etc/relayd.conf and etc/httpd.conf accordingly:

acme-client -v myapp.com
acme-client -v www.myapp.com

Check ratings at SSL Labs and Security Headers.

PostgreSQL

doas -u _postgresql initdb -D /var/postgresql/data/ -U postgres

rcctl enable postgresql
rcctl start postgresql

Create database:

doas -u _postgresql psql -U postgres
CREATE ROLE myapp LOGIN SUPERUSER PASSWORD '<your password>';

Encrypt passwords:

EDITOR=vim rails credentials:edit

database:
  username: myapp
  password: <your password>

Start system services

rcctl enable nsd
rcctl start nsd

rcctl enable httpd
rcctl start httpd

rcctl enable relayd
rcctl start relayd

Start your app

rcctl enable myapp
rcctl start myapp