Install Nginx

• This guide is for Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian version 12 (Bookworm).
• You can run the command cat /etc/issue.net to confirm the version. Debian GNU/Linux 12 should be displayed.
• 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

• Make sure that the web server is started and running

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

• Using a browser, navigate to the IP address of the server on which you have installed Nginx to ensure that Nginx is serving content, e.g. http://127.0.0.1

• The default installation of Nginx does not support serving .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

• Now that the php-fpm service is installed, let us change the default nginx server to use 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;

• Enable PHP processing by leaving this section uncommented. Note that we are using the UNIX socket and that we are using 8.2 and not 7.4 as originally specified in the configuration 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;
}

• Activate 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 configuration of the Nginx web server

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 check that the page displays the PHP information.

• We have found that the version of MySQL that comes with Debian 12 (bookworm) by default causes problems with RADIUSdesk.
• For this reason, we have installed MariaDB as an alternative.
• MariaDB is an open-source relational database management system that is often used as an alternative to MySQL as the database part of the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack.
• It is intended as an immediate replacement for MySQL.
• Be sure to provide a root password for the MariaDB database when prompted if you are security conscious, otherwise just 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

• With Debian 12 (Bookworm), the bundled version of MariaDB is on version 15.1, which has introduced some strict modes that have some issues with the RADIUSdesk database implementation.
• We will disable the 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

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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 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

• 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

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

• 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

• 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

• By default you can log in with the following credentials

Username: root Password: admin

• 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.

• 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

• Be sure to also install FreeRADIUS