deskd

README

Desk Booking

This is a fairly simple desk booking system. It is purposefully simple to make it easier to deploy.

The code is made available under the AGPLv3. For commercial licences please get in touch.

deskd is intended to be run as a cgi program on a web server.

Building

Everything is Go, so you can just use go build or go install to build binaries.

It is now possible (and strongly recommended) to statically build this like so:

go build -v -tags netgo -ldflags="-s -extldflags=-static" -o deskd

so that no libraries need to be copied around if running in chroot or scratch containers.

Configuration

deskd reads its configuration from the same places (in order of precedence):

• commandline flags passed directly to each tool
• environment variables, prefixed with DESKD_

The configuration options are as follows:

Flag	Env	Type	Default	Description
-db	DESKD_DB	string	"deskd.db"	Location of the database
-desks	DESKD_DESKS	string	"desks"	Location of the desk file

Desk File

The desk file is used to define desks available for bookings.

It should be a single file with desk names defined, one per line.

Example:

FE1
FE2
# Comments don't work, this is now a bookable desk name.
FE3
SS1

Warning: removing a desk from the file does not remove associated bookings from the database.

Deployment

The intention is for deskd to be run on OpenBSD httpd, the details of how to do so are documented below.

Configure chroot

I often tend to create a separate directory for the db to live in, but make sure it is writable by the www user:

mkdir -p /var/www/db
chown www:www /var/www/db

Move the binary to the chroot

Build the binary and then move it to /var/www/cgi-bin.

Configure htpasswd

You want user access security right?

Use htpasswd(1) to configure users to a .htpasswd file within the chroot (/var/www).

Note the username you use for .htpasswd is also the username that will be displayed inside the application to identify booked desks.

Copy static files

If you would like deskd to use your favicon and display a floorplan when booking desks then copy favicon.ico and floorplan.png into a suitable location, I tend to choose /var/www/htdocs/static.

Configure httpd

Update the httpd.conf to correctly use TLS (NEVER do HTTP Basic Auth over an unsecured channel), to redirect to TLS and to serve CGI and static files.

server "deskd.example.com" {
	listen on * tls port https
	authenticate with "/.htpasswd"
	tls {
		certificate "/etc/ssl/deskd.example.com.pem"
		key "/etc/ssl/private/deskd.example.com.key"
	}
	location "/static/*" {
		root "/htdocs"
	}
	location "*" {
		fastcgi {
			param SCRIPT_FILENAME "/cgi-bin/deskd"
			param DESKD_DB "/db/deskd.db"
		}
	}
}

server "deskd.example.com" {
	listen on * port http
	location "/.well-known/acme-challenge/*" {
		root "/acme"
		request strip 2
	}
	location "*" {
		block return 301 "https://$HTTP_HOST$REQUEST_URI"
	}
}

Start everything

Start (or restart) the relevant services:

rcctl start httpd slowcgi

Troubleshooting

You may have some permissions issues with the initial database setup (I need to fix this), just make sure it can be read and written by www user.