Install Nginx

Prep

These instructions are for Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian version 12 (bookworm).
You can issue the command cat /etc/issue.net to confirm the version. It should say Debian GNU/Linux 12 .
Make sure it is up to date.

# Get the latest package lists
sudo apt-get update
# Update the system to the latest
sudo apt-get upgrade

Install Nginx

sudo apt-get -y install nginx

Ensure the web server starts up and is running

sudo systemctl stop nginx.service
sudo systemctl start nginx.service

Navigate to the IP Address of the server where you installed Nginx using a browser to ensure Nginx serves content e.g. http://127.0.0.1

Configure Nginx to interpret .php files

The default install of Nginx does not support the serving of .php files.
We will install a program (actually a service) called php-fpm.
This service will listen for requests to interpret.
Install the php-fpm service by installing the default version 8.2 of the packages

sudo apt-get -y install php-fpm
sudo systemctl enable php8.2-fpm
sudo systemctl start php8.2-fpm

Modify Nginx

Now that the php-fpm service is installed we should change the default Nginx server to make use of it.
Edit the default server file:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Add index.php to this line:

# Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

Activate PHP processing by un-commenting this this section. Note that we use the UNIX socket and we are using 8.2 and not 7.4 which is specified originally in the config file.

# pass PHP scripts to FastCGI server
#
location ~ \.php$ {
    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    #
    #       # With php-fpm (or other unix sockets):
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
    #       # With php-cgi (or other tcp sockets):
    #       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
}

Enable the hiding of .htaccess files

# deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
# concurs with nginx's one
#
location ~ /\.ht {
    deny all;
}

Reload the Nginx web server's configuration

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Create a test .php file to confirm that it does work

sudo vi /var/www/html/test.php

Contents

<?php
    phpinfo();
?>

Navigate to http://127.0.0.1/test.php and see if the page display the PHP info.

Install MariaDB

Why MariaDB?

We discovered that the version of MySQL that comes bundled by default with Debian 12 (bookworm) are breaking things on RADIUSdesk.
For this reason we install MariaDB as an alternative.
MariaDB is an open-source relational database management system, commonly used as an alternative for MySQL as the database portion of the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack.
It is intended to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL.
Be sure to supply a root password for the MariaDB database when asked for it if you are security conscious else simply hit the ESC key.

sudo apt-get -y install mariadb-server php8.2-mysql
sudo systemctl enable mariadb
sudo systemctl restart mariadb
sudo systemctl status mariadb

Disable strict mode

With Debian 12 (bookworm), the bundled release of MariaDB is at version 15.1 which introduced a few Strict modes which have some problems with RADIUSdesk database implementation.
We will disable Strict SQL Mode in MariaDB by creating a new file /etc/mysql/conf.d/disable_strict_mode.cnf

sudo vi /etc/mysql/conf.d/disable_strict_mode.cnf

Enter these two lines:

[mysqld]
sql_mode=IGNORE_SPACE,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

Save the file and restart the MySQL Server

sudo systemctl restart mariadb

Performance tune Nginx

Modify expiry date for certain files

Edit the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default file:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Add the following inside the server section:

location ~ ^/cake4/.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|js|css)$ {
    rewrite ^/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/(.*)$ /cake4/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
    rewrite ^/cake4/rd_cake/(.*)$ /cake4/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
    access_log off;
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
}

Add below only if you require backward compatibility (MESHdesk and APdesk).

location ~ ^/cake3/.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|js|css)$ {
    rewrite ^/cake3/rd_cake/webroot/(.*)$ /cake3/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
    rewrite ^/cake3/rd_cake/(.*)$ /cake3/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
    access_log off;
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
}

Reload Nginx:

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Install RADIUSdesk

The first part prepared everything to install RADIUSdesk.
This part will go through the steps to install the latest RADIUSdesk.
RADIUSdesk consists of three components.
- rd directory with its contents contains all the HTML and JavaScript code and is used as the presentation layer.
- cake4 is a CakePHPv4 application and can be considered the engine room. Here the data is processed before being presented by the presentation layer.
- login is a directory with various login pages which are centrally managed through the RADIUSdesk Dynamic Login Pages applet.
Later we will create various symbolic links from locations inside the rdcore directory to locations inside the web server's document root directory.

Required packages

Make sure the following packages are installed.

sudo apt-get -y install php-cli php-mysql php-gd php-curl php-xml php-mbstring php-intl php-sqlite3 git wget
sudo systemctl restart php8.2-fpm

Check out the rdcore git repository.

cd /var/www
sudo git clone https://github.com/RADIUSdesk/rdcore.git

This will create an rdcore directory containing some sub-folders.
It is recommended that you also include the RD Mobile UI.
Check out the rd_mobile git repository.

cd /var/www
sudo git clone https://github.com/RADIUSdesk/rd_mobile.git

Create soft links

We will create soft links in the directory where Nginx will serve the RADIUSdesk contents.

cd /var/www/html
sudo ln -s ../rdcore/rd ./rd
sudo ln -s ../rdcore/cake4 ./cake4
#If backward compatibility is required for older firmware of MESHdesk
sudo ln -s ../rdcore/cake4 ./cake3
sudo ln -s ../rdcore/login ./login
sudo ln -s ../rdcore/AmpConf/build/production/AmpConf ./conf_dev
sudo ln -s ../rdcore/cake4/rd_cake/setup/scripts/reporting ./reporting
#For the RD Mobile UI
sudo ln -s ../rd_mobile/build/production/RdMobile ./rd_mobile

Change Ownerships

Change the ownership of the following files to www-data so Nginx can make changes to the files/directories

sudo mkdir -p  /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/logs
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/files/imagecache
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/tmp
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/tmp
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/logs
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/img/realms
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/img/dynamic_details
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/img/dynamic_photos
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/img/access_providers
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/img/hardwares
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/files/imagecache

The Database

Make sure the timezone on the server is set to UTC (You can use sudo raspi-config)
Populate the timezone data on the DB

#NOTE FAILING THIS STEP will break the RADIUS graphs
#There might be some error messages in the output which is fine - no need to be alarmed
sudo su
mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -u root  mysql

Create an empty database called rd

sudo su
mysql -u root
create database rd;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON rd.* to 'rd'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED BY 'rd';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON rd.* to 'rd'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'rd';
exit;

Populate the database:

sudo mysql -u root rd < /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/setup/db/rd.sql

RADIUSdesk is under active development and sometimes we add SQL patches.
The SQL Patches are located under /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/setup/db/
These patches are non-destructive and you can run them against the database
See the pattern below

sudo mysql -u root rd < /var/www/rdcore/cake4/rd_cake/setup/db/8.068_add_email_sms_histories.sql

Configure Nginx

Configure Nginx to rewrite some RdCore URLs starting with /cake4/rd_cake.
Edit /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Add this once section directly below server_name item. (This is so that this rule is hit first for the reporting side. We do not use CakePHP for the reporting anymore due to performance issues.

server_name _;
location /cake4/rd_cake/node-reports/submit_report.json {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /reporting/reporting.php;
}

If you need backward compatibility support (MESHdesk and APdesk) also add this section:

location /cake3/rd_cake/node-reports/submit_report.json {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /reporting/reporting.php;
}

Add the following configuration block inside the server section (This you can add towards the end):

location /cake4/rd_cake {
   rewrite ^/cake4/rd_cake(.+)$ /cake4/rd_cake/webroot$1 break;
   try_files $uri $uri/ /cake4/rd_cake/index.php$is_args$args;
}

If you need backward compatibility support (MESHdesk and APdesk) also add this section:

location /cake3/rd_cake {
   rewrite ^/cake3/rd_cake(.+)$ /cake3/rd_cake/webroot$1 break;
   try_files $uri $uri/ /cake3/rd_cake/index.php$is_args$args;
}

Reload the Nginx:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Important URLs

The following URLs are important to reach the UI
To load the optimized UI, go to http://127.0.0.1/rd/build/production/Rd/
If you want to serve the content directly out of the webroot, do the following:

sudo cp -R /var/www/html/rd/build/production/Rd/* /var/www/html/

To load the RD Mobile UI, go to http://127.0.0.1/rd_mobile

Login Credentials

By default you can log in with the following credentials

Username: root Password: admin

Cron Scripts

RADIUSdesk requires a few scripts to run periodically in order to maintain a healthy and working system.
To activate the cron scripts execute the following command, which will add RADIUSdesk's crons scripts to the Cron system

sudo cp /var/www/html/cake4/rd_cake/setup/cron/cron4 /etc/cron.d/

If you want to change the default intervals at which the scripts get executed, just edit the /etc/cron.d/cron4 file.

Add LETSENCRYPT certificate

Rather than repeating existing documentation we will just add a URL with the instructions to do it.
You might want to run the following first before going to the instructions in the URL

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install software-properties-common

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-debian-11

Next steps

Be sure to also install FreeRADIUS

RADIUSdesk

Page Tools

Site Tools

User Tools

Table of Contents

Install Nginx

Prep

Configure Nginx to interpret .php files

Modify Nginx

Install MariaDB

Why MariaDB?

Disable strict mode

Performance tune Nginx

Modify expiry date for certain files

Install RADIUSdesk

Required packages

Create soft links

Change Ownerships

The Database

Configure Nginx

Important URLs

Login Credentials

Cron Scripts

Add LETSENCRYPT certificate

Next steps