My Raspberry projects
I got my Raspberry shortly after I started my studies and internship at CIXI, and I learned many things by playing with it.
My tado server self host
Using a tutorial I found online, I found out I could self host a tado automation server (I use tado to control heating).
An issue with tado, is the subscription required to automate the heating stop and start when away from home and when a windows is open.
So to circumvent this subscription, a self hosting it on a cheap Raspberry board seems kind of interesting and cheap, even more when I can use it for other things.
I still need some security
The tutorial above talks about the projects used and that person's docker image. However, taking into account my training, I couldn't just use that.
I had to make my own image.
Not only because I wanted to learn more, but also for security.
My own image
So I started to experiment with the tado_aa github project. How to start from a light official python alpine image, and get to run the script I needed. In the end I managed to get it running, in a podman container, by giving the credentials when running the image, and getting them in the script by using a little sed script.This solution isn't perfect, and in the future, I would need to change the tado script in order to remove the need to write the credentials in the script itself. Maybe by implementing the same thing I made in my pythong backup project.
This webserver self host
I don't need lots of performance for a static website, which not many people would load, so I may as well do it.
So using nginx ?
From what I could read online, Nginx seems to be one of the best tools to host a static website. It would even be faster than Apache.
Obviously, I have to host it in a podman container. So I chose an official Nginx alpine image, changed settings to enhance security, and put a read only volume inside.
And here, an issue starts to appear : Nginx cannot read the files... what a nice security feature from Podman.
I already had this issue at work and couldn't figure out how I could put a volume inside a container using the right user id inside and outside.
This project helped me figure out how to do it. And well here we are, reading this website.