[MM3-users] Re: Easiest way to install a new mailman3 deployment?

Hi,

I completed this on a Debian Buster server instance during last year and have got some notes on the process. I decided to go down the venv route rather than use Docker, but I already had it up and running using the Docker instance on another machine. I found getting it up and running on Docker helped me understand how everything hung together, but ultimately I wanted to run it under a venv so I could understand it a bit more and also I wasn't using Docker in the rest of the environment on that server. I also got caught out earlier on with the Docker containers changing the search engine from Woosh to Xapian which is why I wanted more control over what was going on. Here is a copy of those notes for interest.

I used package managers to provide PostgreSQL support as that was what the Docker install gave me to start with. I may have chosen another DB engine but as I was already using Postgres I stuck with that. I also installed Xapian using the package manager as well as Exim, Nginx, Sassc and Python using the package managers. I didn't install Memcached.

I mainly followed the instructions at: https://wiki.list.org/DOC/Mailman%203%20installation%20experience

My directory structure uses /opt/mailman as the base, the instructions on this web page use /opt/mailman/mm and I didn't have this extra subdirectory. I ensured this directory was owned by list:list. I installed my venv under /opt/mailman/venv choosing to copy over the existing distribution installed Python packages and installed the following packages via Pip after activating it:

Upgrade packages that are already installed which need an upgrade to work with Mailman3: pip3 install -U pip zope.interface

Get the rest installed: pip3 install mailman mailmanclient django-mailman3 mailman-hyperkitty hyperkitty postorius psycopg2-binary xapian-haystack

This also installs Gunicorn which I use as the backend wsgi server.

The reason I chose to use existing system packages as part of the venv is because I wanted to use the Xapian installation I had installed via system packages as I ran into issues installing it via Pip. In future I think I will try and install the PostgreSQL driver this way as well.

Once deactivating the venv I recommend getting the directory structure and files copied to the right places from the links on the wiki, noting that in my cases I had to edit the files to change the relevant paths to suit my new layout, and also where necessary (Systemd units) change the user/group. . You should then run all the Mailman specific commands using these scripts in /opt/mailman/bin. I learnt the hard way that you will run into problems if you try and run Mailman from the venv directory as it will look for files in the wrong place and create data files in the wrong directory. As I went down this road my configuration files mailman.cfg and mailman-hyperkitty.cfg are actually located in /opt/mailman/etc but that isn't a requirement if you follow the wiki and use the scripts provided.

I obtained manage.py, settings.py, urls.py and wsgi.py from the Gitlab Mailman-suite project instead of the wiki site to ensure I got the latest versions and put these files in /opt/mailman. Regarding /opt/mailman/bin/mailman-post/update, I removed the references to Memcached as I didn't use it. I also didn't symlink /opt/mailman/logs to /opt/mailman/var/logs as advised by the wiki but will do this on a reinstall.

I generated a new Mailman PostgreSQL user and restored my existing database to the new server (which also upgraded the DB to a newer Postgresql version as the Docker-Compose from the Mailman Docker project uses an older Postgresql container). I copied the Mailman runtime files from the Mailman core container data volume to /opt/mailman/var. I generated a Hyperkitty API secret key and also a Django secret key.

Taking the mailman.cfg file from the wiki as a base, I updated the following parts:

[database] class: mailman.database.postgresql.PostgreSQLDatabase url: postgres://mailman:[password]@localhost/mailmandb

[mailman] site_owner: mailman-owner@lists.domain.com

[mta] incoming: mailman.mta.exim4.LMTP configuration: python:mailman.config.exim4

[archiver.hyperkitty] class: mailman_hyperkitty.Archiver enable: yes configuration: /opt/mailman/etc/mailman-hyperkitty.cfg

In /opt/mailman/etc/mailman-hyperkitty.cfg add the following: [general] base_url: http://localhost:8000/hyperkitty/ api_key: [generated-hyperkitty-api-key]

Using systemctl see if you can start Mailman and observe logs etc.

In terms of the Django stuff you need to create /opt/mailman/settings-local.py which will be read in by the system and will overwrite the default settings in /opt/mailman/settings.py obtained from the Mailman-suite project. This directly configures the Django framework which the Mailman web components Postorius and Hyperkitty run under.

Here is a outline copy of my file:

import os

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)) SECRET_KEY = '[generated-django-secret-key]' MAILMAN_ARCHIVER_KEY = '[generated-hyperkitty-api-key]' DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = 'mailman-owner@lists.domain.com' EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend' DEBUG = False USE_X_FORWARDED_HOST = True SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')

ALLOWED_HOSTS = [ 'localhost', 'lists.domain.com' ]

INSTALLED_APPS = ( # Copy the installed apps from the settings.py and remove the social provider logins you don't want to support. )

DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2', 'NAME': 'mailmandb', 'USER': 'mailman', 'PASSWORD': '[password]', 'HOST': 'localhost' } }

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = { 'default': { 'PATH': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "fulltext_index"), 'ENGINE': 'xapian_backend.XapianEngine' }, }

LOGGING = { # Copy the complete LOGGING section from settings.py and change the path as follows, if there is a way of just adding the relevant path override to this file let me know. I am doing this only because I didn't create a symlink for /opt/mailman/logs. 'version': 1, 'disable_existing_loggers': False, 'filters': { [...] } }, 'handlers': { 'mail_admins': { [...] }, 'file':{ 'level': 'INFO', 'class': 'logging.handlers.WatchedFileHandler', 'filename': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'var/logs', 'mailmansuite.log'), 'formatter': 'verbose', }, 'console': { [...] }, }, 'loggers': { 'django.request': { [...] }, 'django': { [...] }, 'hyperkitty': { [...] }, 'postorius': { [...] }, }, 'formatters': { 'verbose': { [...] }, 'simple': { [...] }, }, }

Try running /opt/mailman/bin/mailman-post-update and choose to rebuild indexes, see if the static files get saved to /opt/mailman/static and the search indexes get saved to /opt/mailman/fulltext_index. In my case I had plenty of indexing to do, not sure if these files are created on a green-field installation with nothing archived. This command will also populate the Postgresql database schema.

See if the Systemd units for mailman-web and mailman-cluster come up. Observe logs. If everything ok the Gunicorn should be listening on localhost:8000.

For Nginx integration I followed the wiki, only change I had to make was to send the host header to the backend server, here is a partial config file:

server { server_name lists.domain.com; root /var/www/lists; access_log /var/log/nginx/lists-access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/lists-error.log warn; listen [::]:443 ssl; # managed by Certbot listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/lists.domain.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/lists.domain.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot

location = /favicon.ico {
    log_not_found off;
}

location = /robots.txt {
    log_not_found off;
}

location / {
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8000/;
}

location /static {
    alias /opt/mailman/static;
}

}

server { if ($host = lists.domain.com) { return 301 https://$host$request_uri; } # managed by Certbot

listen 80; listen [::]:80; server_name lists.domain.com; return 404; # managed by Certbot }

For Exim integration I followed to the letter the information here: https://mailman.readthedocs.io/en/latest/src/mailman/docs/mta.html#exim

Here is a Logrotate script which is not in the Mailman wiki:

/opt/mailman/var/logs/*.log { missingok sharedscripts su list list postrotate /opt/mailman/bin/mailman reopen &>/dev/null || true if [ -r /opt/mailman/var/gunicorn.pid ]; then PID=cat /opt/mailman/var/gunicorn.pid kill -s USR1 $PID fi endscript }

I have been running this setup since March 2020, I run around 10 lists on this server with around 10 mails per list per day. I actually had more issues when moving from Mailman2 to Mailman3 using the Docker containers and actually this process made me understand a lot more how everything hangs together and where to troubleshoot issues.

Hope this helps someone out there. Andrew.

-----Original Message----- From: Matthew Alberti <matthew@alberti.us> Sent: 01 January 2021 02:48 To: ieso@johnwillson.com Cc: 'Mailman users' <mailman-users@mailman3.org> Subject: [MM3-users] Re: Easiest way to install a new mailman3 deployment?

I had a very similar experience. I don't mean to knock the dev team; Mailman3 is an awesome  tool that really meets a need. It is really much much more than a 'tool.' A very comprehensive software suite.

For me, I ended up using the docker option on Ubuntu 20.04. My advice is to give up on the idea of using OS package managers. They just aren't current enough (certainly for Ubuntu LTS), or updated frequently enough, for the current development of Mailman3. Nothing but problems for me on Ubuntu, and Debian is about the same.

Pypi, or installation in a virtualized environment, was equally challenging. I strongly recommend the docker installation method. It is not quite turnkey, but the documentation is close enough where it might  'just work' in your environment. I used MariaDB, and that introduced some challenges. If you are using postgre, postfix, and nginx, you are pretty close to a very easy installation.

This list is very supportive, with very frequent responses from the core dev team. And there are guys like me who really struggled to get to a production instance.  Please let us all know what isn't working in the docker approach, and we will try to help I'm sure.

• Matt Alberti

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On Dec 31, 2020, 8:15 PM, at 8:15 PM, ieso@johnwillson.com wrote:

So I've been trying for the last two weeks to get a new mailman3 server running on a virtualized server (any server), and I'm turning to this list after having failed many times and running out of holiday time.

I started trying a non-docker installation on Ubuntu 18.04 (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xIcSsoNFp2nHi7r4eQys00s9a0k2sHhu1V 5PlantPTs/edit#) , which got me the closest. Except I had a problem with inbound email only being triggered when it came from certain accounts. But that clearly wasn't good enough for production, so after many attempts to figure out where it was failing, I decided to turn to docker as a solution that should be cleaner.

A few attempts at doing a docker installation on digitalocean.com failed, which I realized might be due to it not routing private IP addresses, so I moved to AWS after checking that their VPC policy would fit mailman's docker requirements. I found a great but slightly outdated guide on how to do this (https://xiaoxing.us/2018/01/01/deploy-mailman-3-on-aws-using-docker/). By this point I knew enough to correct a number of places where the environment had changed since the procedure was written, but postorius still failed at the curl test.

The challenge for me has been the difficulty to know how to troubleshoot the different different systems and network infrastructure that are used to keep mailman3 humming. I've tried about 7 different installation walkthroughs (there are no recent ones on Youtube by the way, in case anyone wants to seize that opportunity!), and the good guides provide ways to check each stage to try to help you a bit on that front.

Nonetheless, I feel stuck and thought I'd ask the simple question... for a completely basic, barebones new installation, what's the easiest way to get a mailman3 installation up-and running? (e.g. Which server provider? Which operating system and version? Docker or otherwise?)

Any pointers highly appreciated. Google Groups is clearly on its way out, as it no longer allows for people to easily join groups by sending an email or clicking a link, so that should be a big opportunity for mailman3 to step up and help give those mailing list migrants a new home... which is what we're looking for. We're just not quite as smart as you guys. ;-) _______________________________________________ Mailman-users mailing list -- mailman-users@mailman3.org To unsubscribe send an email to mailman-users-leave@mailman3.org https://lists.mailman3.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.mailman3.org/

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