Lichen CMS Tutorial

This is a tutorial on how to set up Lichen, a minimal CMS/static site server that uses Gemtext for the user to create pages, on Nearly Free Speech[4]. To run it locally, follow the instructions on the Lichen site[1].

Getting Started

Make sure you have these things downloaded before getting started:

NearlyFreeSpeech account (using all recommended defaults should be fine)
Some kind of terminal (OSX's "Terminal" or iTerm2)
Any web browser

NearlyFreeSpeech

Create a new account and make a new site.
Get your SSH login details from the site under the "Sites" tab (enable SSH if not yet enabled).
Using your terminal, SSH into your site. Follow the recommendations from NFS on how to log in (correct username, domain, etc.).
Clone the Lichen repo[3] in your public folder: git clone <repo.url> (you should automatically be in the public folder, but to check, try echo $PWD). If you type ls -l, you should see a folder called lichen.
Move all the files from the new lichen folder into the public folder: mv ./lichen/* ./. If you type ls -l, you should see a lot more files and folders.

Lichen

Go into the cgi-bin directory: cd cgi-bin.
Verify that all .cgi files in the cgi-bin folder have execute permissions enabled. If you type ls -l *.cgi, all entries should have a series of letters and hyphens and the start of the line; these should all contain three x's.
Go back to the public folder: cd ..
Ensure that the public files can be written and modified by your web server; this may require changing file or directory permissions: chgrp -R web /home/public.

At this point, if you go to the URL for your site (make sure you turn off maintenance mode[6]), you should see the stock Lichen homepage!

Creating Users

Now that we have the software installed, we are going to add edit functionality. We need to make a password file[2] for Lichen to read so we can edit pages. htpasswd is a way for Apache to create an encrypted password file on the server.

Create a new "AuthUserFile" and user using htpasswd. From the public folder: htpasswd -c ../protected/.htpasswd newUserName. Enter in the password for your new user; this is what you will use for editing pages in Lichen.
Find the "Apache Document Root" for your site on Nearly Free Speech under the "Sites" tab and the current site.
Edit the .htaccess file: nano cgi-bin/.htaccess
Change the AuthUserFile line, replacing the filepath with what you copied off of NFS followed by the path to the new htpasswd file. e.g. If your Apache Document Root is /fabc/test_domain/, you would change the line to AuthUserFile /fabc/test_domain/protected/.htpasswd.

Now we should be able to navigate to the URL for our site followed by /cgi-bin/edit.cgi and enter in our username and password, resulting in access to the CMS backend!

References

Incoming Links

Last modified: 202401040446