Abra server config

The commands on this page are all on our dev computer.

Creating server config

We already made our Raspberry Pi available on our local wifi, and can access it via YOUR_HOSTNAME.local. That same local address how we’re going to be referring to it with abra.

Let’s start by creating the server config:

abra server add YOUR_HOSTNAME.local

If that worked, you should see it in the list of servers that abra is now managing by running:

abra server list

And you should see this server in your list of servers.

Creating self-signed certificates

For this server, we’re going to need SSL certificates so that it can encrypt traffic. Since we’re using a server at a .local address, we can’t use the regular, internet-based ways of doing this. We need to create our own.

This uses the openssl tool. If your dev computer is Linux, you probably already have it installed. On other operating systems you might need to find it to install.

Here’s the command. It’s a pretty big one. Before you paste it into your terminal, you need to go through and replace every instance of YOUR_HOSTNAME with the actual hostname of your pi (eg: lores). You run this on your dev computer.

openssl req -x509 -out pi_local.crt -keyout pi_local.key \
  -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -sha256 \
  -subj '/CN=YOUR_HOSTNAME.local' -extensions EXT -config <( \
   printf "[dn]\nCN=YOUR_HOSTNAME.local\n[req]\ndistinguished_name = dn\n[EXT]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:YOUR_HOSTNAME.local,DNS:*.local\nkeyUsage=digitalSignature\nextendedKeyUsage=serverAuth")

When you run this, it should generate two files: pi_local.crt and pi_local.key.

If you’ve got those files, we’re ready to move onto the next step and install something on our server.

Checklist

You should have completed:

We have created the server config in abra on our dev computer
We have created a pair of self-signed certificate files on our dev computer