Busser

Simply host your corner of the internet in Rust

✔️ Host static (but automatically refreshable) website content from a given directory

✔️ URL shortening, e.g. /x/y/z/webpage.html aliased as /x/y/z/webpage

✔️ Http redirect to https and Https certificates

✔️ IP throttling, and anonymised hit statistics

✔️ Authenticated API for status/statistics polling, with Discord webhook integration

✔️ Hot 🔥 loadable configuration

✔️ Host via free tier cloud services or a Raspberry Pi!

• Spinning up
  • Configuration
• Free static website hosting example with Google Cloud Free Tier

---

Spinning up

1. Just create a folder with your .html/.css/.js and other resources, .png, .gif, ...
2. Point Busser to it with a config.json
3. Run it, and that's it!*

* you'll need certificates for https, and open ports

Configuration

The config.json specifies key properties of the site and its content

{
    "port_https": 443,
    "port_http": 80, 
    "throttle": 
    {
        "max_requests_per_second": 64.0, 
        "timeout_millis": 5000, 
        "clear_period_seconds": 3600
    },
    "stats": 
    {
        "save_period_seconds": 10,
        "path": "stats",
        "hit_cooloff_seconds": 60,
        "digest_period_seconds": 86400,
        "log_files_clear_period_seconds": 2419200,
        "ignore_regexes": ["/favicon.ico"]
    },
    "content": 
    {
        "path": "/home/jerboa/Website/",
        "home": "/home/jerboa/Website/jerboa.html",
        "allow_without_extension": true,
        "browser_cache_period_seconds": 3600,
        "server_cache_period_seconds": 1,
        "ignore_regexes": ["/.git", "workspace"]
    },
    "domain": "127.0.0.1",
    "api_token": "some_secure_secret_token",
    "notification_endpoint": { "addr": "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/abc/xyz" },
    "cert_path": "certs/cert.pem",
    "key_path": "certs/key.pem"
}

---

GDPR, Cookie Policies, and Privacy Policies

• The IP throttler only stores hashes of an IP and a request path, it is likely not considered identifiable information.

• The statistics collection stores the IP, hit time, path, and counts for each IP-path pair. The IP is stored as a hash value.

---

API

Currently there is an API function to request a statistics digest, the following bash script will perform the request. It is currently limited to only returning stats based on already saved data.

# ./get_stats.sh the_secret_token '{"from_utc":"2024-03-07T08:40:50.948868839+00:00","post_discord": false}'
hmac=$(echo -n $2 | openssl dgst -sha256 -hmac $1 | sed 's/SHA2-256(stdin)= //g') 
curl -v -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d "$2" -H 'api: StatsDigest' -H "busser-token: ${hmac}" -X POST https://your.domain

---

Free static website hosting example with Google Cloud Free Tier

The gcloud free tier allows for the following instance running 24/7:

    1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM instance per month in one of the following US regions:
        Oregon: us-west1
        Iowa: us-central1
        South Carolina: us-east1
    30 GB-months standard persistent disk
    1 GB of outbound data transfer from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month

You will still see costs in the Google cloud console, or savings suggestions. You should recieve free tier discount deductions to nullify these cost completely

This can be verified by:

1. Navigating to the Google Cloud Console
2. Selecting Billing form the burger menu (top left as of now)
3. Selecting Cost Table
4. In Filters (right) select SKUs
5. Type e2
6. Select the all (e.g. 16 filtered results)
7. Toggle the arrow for you project
8. Toggle Compute Engine
9. You should see e.g. E2 Instance Core running in Americas with X.XX
10. You should also see e.g. E2 Instance Ram running with free tier discount with -X.XX

As this is a website you may be charged for network costs over the 1 GB outbound data, or for traffic from China and Australia

Create it using the CLI...

Using the gloud cli this command should create an instance template for the free tier, which can be used to create instances

gcloud beta compute instance-templates create free-tier-template-http --project=YOUR_PROJECT --machine-type=e2-micro \\
--network-interface=network=default,network-tier=PREMIUM \\
--instance-template-region=projects/YOUR_PROJECT/regions/us-central1 --maintenance-policy=MIGRATE \\
--provisioning-model=STANDARD --service-account=YOUR_SERVICE_ACCOUNT \\
--scopes=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/devstorage.read_only,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/logging.write,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/monitoring.write,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/servicecontrol,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/service.management.readonly,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/trace.append \\
--enable-display-device --tags=http-server,https-server \\
--create-disk=auto-delete=yes,boot=yes,device-name=free-tier-template,image=projects/debian-cloud/global/images/debian-11-bullseye-v20220719,mode=rw,size=30,type=pd-standard 
--no-shielded-secure-boot --shielded-vtpm --shielded-integrity-monitoring --reservation-affinity=any

...or using Cloud console

• create an e2 in us-central1 (Iowa) for both zone and region
• select e2-micro (0.25-2 vCPU 1GB memory)
• you can change the boot disc from 10GB to 30GB if you like
• allow HTTPS and HTTP (if you need it for certificate provising)
• all else as default

Network

Make sure 443 and 80 are open ports (or whatever ports you wish to serve on)

https certificate setup

Self signed (useful for localhost testing)

• You can use the bash script certs/gen.sh to generate a key/cert pair with openssl

Production; from authority

• get a domain (e.g. from squarespace)
• create a custom DNS record, e.g.
  • your.domain.somewhere A 1 hour google.cloud.instance.ip
• Use Let's Encrypts recommendation of certbot it really is very easy
  • Something like sudo certbot certonly --standalone -d your.domain.somewhere -d sub.your.domain.somehwere
  • You will need to enable http in the cloud instance firewall for provisioning as well as https

Spinning up

Either: Run at login, root may be required for certificates (should be for certbot ones)

Or: Use a service file in /lib/systemd/system, e.g

[Unit]
Description=Busser

[Service]
ExecStart=busser -d
WorkingDirectory=/home/busser
User=root

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then start and monitor it with

sudo systemctl start busser.service and sudo journalctl -e -u busser.service