Installation

The common way of installing espyta is by installing from PyPI. I suggest you to use a virtual environment, these prevent accidentally updating libraries that your other projects or even your operating system depend on.

For a Debian based distribution installation would look like this:

python3 -m venv virtual-environment virtual-environment/bin/pip install espyta

After this you can run espyta in the following way:

virtual-environment/bin/espyta http

This will start the built-in HTTP server on localhost, port 8000.

Running on boot

If you wish to run espyta as an actual service there’s a few more things we will need to take care of. This bit of the documentation has strong ideas about how to host a website and doesn’t provide commands but general guidance.

This guide only applies to Linux and BSD systems though I am sure it can be applied to Windows systems as well if you read synonymous terms where necessary.

Prerequisites

• A HTTP server or proxy such as nginx, haproxy, apache2, etc.

Setup

Start by creating a separate user for your espyta this way we can make use of the filesystem.

After you’ve created this user it’s now time to setup an environment where this users code will live. Let’s get into their homedir and then perform the initial section of this document as the user you’ve just created.

From now on I’ll assume you have /home/youruser/virtual-environment with espyta installed to it.

We’ll create a configuration file /home/youruser/espyta.toml with the following content:

database_uri = "mysql+pymysql://user:password@host/database"

If you want to configure more then read the Configuration section.

Now that we have all of this setup it’s time to test out espyta real quick:

/home/youruser/virtual-environment/bin/espyta --configuration-path /home/youruser/espyta.toml http

This should start espyta listening on localhost port 8000. Verify that this is the case.

I will use systemd for this example since it comes pre-installed on most of our systems nowadays.

Take the example systemd unit file from the repository and place it in /etc/systemd/system/espyta.service. Then open the file and adjust the paths to the paths you’ve created.

After you’ve done this you can systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl enable espyta.service. Check its status, if it has come up verify that you can connect to localhost port 8000 as well and get served with the espyta homepage.

Now it’s time to configure our webserver to forward requests to espyta. I’ll use nginx in this example but the ideas carry over to anything you might be using.

Here’s an example nginx configuration file:

server {
        listen 443 ssl ;
        listen [::]:443 ssl ;

        root /var/www/empty;

        server_name myespyta.net; # managed by Certbot

        add_header X-Xss-Protection "1; mode=block" always;
        add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff" always;
        add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN" always;
        add_header Content-Security-Policy "default-src 'self'" always;
        add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains; preload" always;
        add_header Referrer-Policy "no-referrer" always;
        add_header Feature-Policy "accelerometer 'none'; camera 'none'; geolocation 'none'; gyroscope 'none'; magnetometer 'none'; microphone 'none'; payment 'none'; usb 'none'" always;

        location / {
                limit_req zone=myespyta burst=100;
                proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
                proxy_set_header Host $host;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
        }

        access_log /home/youruser/myespyta.net_access.log;

        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/myespyta.net/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/myespyta.net/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
}

Place that file in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/myespyta.net and reload your nginx. It is important that you pass the Host header and protocol as espyta will use these to build its URLs.