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Setting Up Flight Web Suite

System Prerequisites

In order to authenticate the user in the web interface, the following must be true:

  • User has a password (can be set with the passwd command or through other user management software that is setup on the system)
  • Ports 80 & 443 on the gateway must be accessible (allowed through both the system firewall and cloud security group)
  • SSH password authentication must be enabled (can be set in /etc/ssh/sshd_config in CentOS or through other access management software that is setup on the system)

Setting Domain Name

The domain name is what the Web-Suite will be accessed through, either a hostname or ip address. It is also used for certificate generation, and a publicly accessible value should be used if intending to use Lets Encrypt certificates.

Set the domain name: 

flight web-suite set-domain chead1.mycluster1.example.com

Restart the web-suite to apply changes: 

flight web-suite restart

Certificate Preparation

To secure the server connections, it is recommended to generate a certificate to be used by the web suite. The Flight Web Suite comes with tools that can generate either a "self-signed" or LetsEncrypt certificate. Alternatively, a certificate that has been created outside of the web suite can be used to secure the server.

A self-signed certificate, whilst not usually trusted by browsers, does still provide extra security to the web server over HTTP communication.

A self-signed certificate is automatically created when setting the domain name. To generate and install the self-signed certificates, simply:

flight www cert-gen --cert-type self-signed --domain $(flight web-suite get-domain)

Note

If --domain is omitted, a sensible default is selected. The default is taken from either the last --domain value given to flight www cert-gen or the last value given to flight web-suite set-domain. If neither of those have been given, the command will complain, and the domain will need to be specified.

Note

If --cert-type is omitted a sensible default is selected. The default is taken from the last --cert-type value given to flight www cert-gen or self-signed if none has been given before.

After this has run, changes are applied on a service restart:

flight web-suite restart

To generate and install a Lets Encrypt certificate, run the following (replacing the domain and email with appropriate values): 

flight www cert-gen --cert-type lets-encrypt --domain <chead1.mycluster1.example.com> --email <user@example.com>

Note

If --domain is omitted, a sensible default is selected. The default is taken from either the last --domain value given to flight www cert-gen or the last value given to flight web-suite set-domain. If neither of those have been given, the command will complain, and the domain will need to be specified.

Warning

Ensure that the domain/IP is publicly accessible in order for certificate generation to work

The Let's Encrypt certificate is only valid for a limited time. Depending on how long a cluster is intended to live for, it may be useful to install a cron job to automate renewing the certificate.

flight www cron-renewal

The cronjob can be removed by running:

flight www cron-renewal --disable

After this has run, changes are applied on a service restart: 

flight web-suite restart

Externally generated certificates can be used by instructing www to install them, to do this you will need:

  • fullchain.pem: The full certificate
  • privkey.pem: The private key for the certificate

Once you've obtained these files and placed them on the host, add them with:

flight www cert-install /path/to/privkey.pem /path/to/fullchain.pem

If the Web Suite was already running then restart it with:

flight web-suite restart

Connecting to Web Suite

Navigate to the external IP or hostname set for the gateway (that was provided to the set-domain command, for example, https://51.104.217.61)

Log in with the same user details used for accessing the cluster from a CLI.

If you find yourself being logged out when changing pages, you may need to add an entry in your hosts file..