Running Community Solid Server with Debian, pm2, and nginx

Here we document one possible way to set up Community Solid Server (CSS), including https and default app — Mashlib.

This instruction is for CSS v7 — latest version at the time of writing.

Steps:

1. Own a domain name and point it to the server's IP address
2. Create a dedicated Linux user
3. Prepare project folder structure
4. Install Community Solid Server
5. Set up nginx, and certificates with LetsEncrypt
6. CSS Configuration
7. Run CSS with pm2
8. Set up Mashlib
9. Backup data regularly with cron

Prerequisities

You'll need:

• a domain name
• a server with Debian 11 and static IP address, VPS from a server provider will do
• Node and npm installed, maybe also NVM (Node Version Manager)
• pm2 installed
• nginx installed
• ftp server to backup the data

Conventions

Placeholders

We mark placeholders [placeholder]. You should always replace them with your own string. For example replace [port] with 3456. Whatever you choose instead of the placeholders, keep it consistent across this whole instruction.

• [user] - linux user to run the CSS server
• [projectname] - folder name in [user]'s home environment where we keep everything
• [port] - port on which the CSS will run locally; no other application should run on the same port; choose 4 numbers like 3456
• [your.domain] - the domain on which the server is going to run

Linux user

You need to run some commands as root, and others as regular [user]. Make sure you always run them as the correct user. It matters a lot! You may even want to open 2 ssh connections to your server — one as [user], the other as [root].

Look for # run as [user] or # run as root at the beginning of the script snippets.

Next: Let's get started with the setup