Heimdall behind nginx, on Debian 11 - no Docker

[esbeeb]

After running into a dead end with trying to run Heimdall in a Docker container (which is the only currently-official installation method; Docker enjoys deity-like status these days, to the exclusion of all other "traditional" installation methods), I installed Heimdall v2.4.13 in Debian 11, with the following steps:

sudo apt install php7.4-sqlite3 php7.4-bcmath php7.4-json php7.4-xml php7.4-fpm php7.4-mbstring php7.4-gd php7.4-common php7.4-zip nginx
sudo su -
cd /var/www
# download the latest Heimdall release, download links listed here: https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall/releases
wget https://github.com/linuxserver/Heimdall/archive/refs/tags/v2.4.13.tar.gz
tar zxvf v2.4.13.tar.gz
mv Heimdall-2.4.13 heimdall
chown -R www-data.www-data heimdall
# If you are proficient in configuring nginx, here is a sample conf that could be put in /etc/nginx/sites-available/heimdall (and then later enabled)...
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
nano ../sites-available/heimdall

Copy and paste in the following, then saving, quitting:

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    #listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on;
    # You are assumed to know how to set up SSL certs
    # To create a self-signed SSL cert, here's a decent tutorial:
    # https://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=Debian_11&p=ssl&f=1
    ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/private/server.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/server.key;
    server_name _;
    root /var/www/heimdall/public/;
    client_max_body_size 5M;
    index index.php index.html;
    location / {
        # needed by PHP Laravel, or /users, /items, /tags, /settings don't work
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }
    # serve static files directly
    location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico)$ {
       access_log off;
    }
    # pass PHP scripts on Nginx to FastCGI (PHP-FPM) server
    location ~ \.php$ {
       include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
       fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
    }
}

Let's serve Heimdall, with Nginx:

    ln -s ../sites-available/heimdall heimdall
    systemctl enable nginx
    systemctl restart nginx

Now aim your web browser at the IP address of the hosting machine, and don't forget "https://" at the start of the URL, because heimdall-behind-nginx is listening on port 443.

Custom Heimdall favicon set: The default favicons were an ugly grey, so if you'd like to have simple green dots instead, then there's an alternate favicon set. These are nothing too fancy (since Heimdall is a "Start page" of sorts... "green means go" felt symbolic of that, and is easy for people to relate to, what with traffic lights having green meaning go). See #674 (comment)

These favicon files, once decompressed, can simply be copied over the default files found in halftop:/var/www/heimdall/public. Harder to do in a Docker container.

Custom Title of "Your Site": You can change the title by changing the APP_NAME in the .env". In the file: /var/www/heidall/.env
change the first line to:
APP_NAME="Your Site"
Save, then refresh the page in your web browser.

Adding custom search providers: edit the file /var/www/heimdall/storage/app/searchproviders.yaml

Note: /var/www/heimdall/public/storage needs to be a symlink pointing to /var/www/heimdall/storage/app/pubic. This symlink gets created after the first successful running of heimdall.

Also Note: When I run Heimdall behind nginx, the RAM and CPU usage is so tiny that it pretty much doesn’t exist when you try to watch it in htop. A compressed backup of the entire /var/www/heimdall folder (this is after I’ve configured it with about a dozen “Application buttons”, a background image, etc), which entirely contains Heimdall, is like 11MB.