Written from: June 20, 2023 To: June 27, 2023

Building A Webserver in OpenBSD From Scratch

Preamble

I've decided that - now that I understand both UNIX-like systems and the web better - it is time to migrate my old web servers from their scrappy origins to their own servers. I'm going to host multiple on the same server, mainly because they will be using related stacks, and also because it helps save money (storage is expensive when using a VPS) The setup steps are documented as follows:

What software are we using? What's the stack?

The hardware is going to be a VPS. Just to start off I've used the cheapest server vultr offered that still had an IPV4 address. We can expand the size of the drives later.

Hardware:

Vultr VPS

Software

OS: OpenBSD 7.3 (any version will work, but this guide was written for this one. OpenBSD's main strengths are its security-centric defaults, it's ease of use, it's low memory footprint compared to an equivalent server running Debian. My personal favorite feature of the BSDs when compared to Linux is the fact that there is a well-defined and easily accessible base install. It makes package management much easier, and it becomes stupid simple to remove all extra crap from a computer.)
Firewall: pf - pre-installed with OpenBSD
ssh: openSSH - pre-installed with OpenBSD
HTTP(S) Server: httpd - pre-installed with OpenBSD. *Note: This is NOT Apache's httpd, this is OpenBSD's own custom server
ACME Client: acme-client - pre-installed with OpenBSD. *Note: This is used to acquire SSL/TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt, so you can serve your site over secure HTTPS.

If all you're doing is serving static files, this is all you need. If you want an email server, you'll need some more

MTA / SMTP Server: openSMTPD - pre-install with OpenBSD
MDA / IMAP Server: dovecot

Planned but unimplemented

Spam protection: rspamd
Antivirus for windows: ClamAV

And that's the whole stack. Also good to remember is that you are going to need tools to let you configure your website, such as vi (or your preferred editor), your preferred shell if you can't stand ksh, etc. I can't stand using bare vi, I always install vim, and I have no problems with ksh, but I created a custom config with a nicer prompt. Anywho, this is all beside the point. Let's create a website.
How to set up:

If you've done this before, take a look at the speedrunning guide to get you up and running as quick as possible, with minimal explanations.