Complicated Documentation

[inferenceus]

Describe the problem/question

As someone who hosts many services on my own infrastructure, I am finding the PrivateBin documentation to be very lacking and confusing.

I downloaded and extracted the tarball, created a user specifically for PrivateBin (I chose privbin), followed the documentation to move the mentioned directories to a different location for security purposes (I chose /var/lib/privbin/), gave access to both the website directory and the PrivateBin directory to both the Nginx user and PrivateBin user, then added a configuration file for the domain I'm using (<domain>/index.php) for Nginx.

At this point, whenever I visit my PrivateBin instance, it automatically downloads the index.php file with a random filename, but loads absolutely nothing. How does the PHP server even start? None of this is documented in the official documentation.

Did you use the FAQ section?

• Yes, I have read the FAQ and I found no solution/answer there.

What you did?

1. Download and extract tarball
2. Create user specifically for PrivateBin
3. Follow documentation to move mentioned directories to different location for security purposes
4. Give access to both the website directory and the PrivateBin directory to both the web-server user and PrivateBin user
5. Add web-server configuration file for domain used for PrivateBin
6. Webpage immediately downloads index.php rather than loading it like a standard webpage would use for the index webpage

What happens

Webpage immediately downloads index.php rather than loading it like a standard webpage would do for the index webpage.

What should happen

Webpage loads and PrivateBin can be used.

Additional information

No response

Server address

https://bin.inferencium.net/

Server OS

Gentoo Linux

Webserver

Nginx

PrivateBin version

2.0.3

Browser and version

Firefox 147.0.2

Local operating system and version

Gentoo Linux

Issue reproducibility

No, I cannot reproduce it on https://privatebin.net.

[rugk]

Without knowing your server details that our hard to debug. Anyway, when a php file is downloaded (the source contents?) or seems your webserver is not configured correctly to interpret php as php.

Apart from that, obviously we're always open to have our documentation improved and pull requests improving that are always appreciated.

[elrido]

That sounds like you haven't installed a PHP runtime. With nginx, PHP scripts typically get executed using the PHP-fpm service, which is connected to nginx via fcgi socket. This is really outside of the scope of our applications installation. If you don't already have PHP applications setup, please look at your operating systems / Linux distros documentation on how to set PHP up with nginx. With apache and mod_php, the setup is different yet again.

Alternatively, do have a look at our container images. These come with application servers pre-configured and you only need to reverse proxy your desired vhost in your own nginx back into the containers locally exposed port.