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Installation

TL;DR

Download the latest release archive (with the link labelled as "Source code (…)") and extract it in your web hosts folder where you want to install your PrivateBin instance. We try to provide a mostly safe default configuration, but we urge you to check the security section below and the configuration options to adjust as you see fit.

NOTE: See our FAQ entry on securely downloading release files for more information.

NOTE: There are Ansible roles available for installing and configuring PrivateBin on your server. You can choose from the following options:

Podman Rootless - PrivateBin by @voidquark (Github source code): Simplifies the deployment and management of a secure PrivateBin service using a rootless Podman container. Key features include root-less deployment, ensuring security within a user namespace, idempotent deployment for consistent state, out-of-the-box setup for Red Hat systems, and the flexibility to customize PrivateBin configurations. It has been tested on EL9.
Config Configuration - PrivateBin by @e1mo (Github source code): Deploy PrivateBin configuration to disk with a customized configuration.

Minimal Requirements

PHP version 7.3 or above
GD extension (when using identicon or vizhash icons, jdenticon works without it)
zlib extension
some disk space or a database supported by PDO
ability to create files and folders in the installation directory and the PATH defined in index.php
A web browser with JavaScript and (optional) WebAssembly support

Hardening and Security

Changing the Path

In the index.php you can define a different PATH. This is useful to secure your installation. You can move the utilities, configuration, data files, templates and PHP libraries (directories bin, cfg, doc, data, lib, tpl, tst and vendor) outside of your document root. This new location must still be accessible to your webserver and PHP process (see also open_basedir setting).

PATH Example

Your PrivateBin installation lives in a subfolder called "paste" inside of your document root. The URL looks like this: http://example.com/paste/

The full path of PrivateBin on your webserver is: /srv/example.com/htdocs/paste

When setting the path like this: define('PATH', '../../secret/privatebin/');

PrivateBin will look for your includes and data here: /srv/example.com/secret/privatebin

Changing the config path only

In situations where you want to keep the PrivateBin static files separate from the rest of your data, or you want to reuse the installation files on multiple vhosts, you may only want to change the conf.php. In this case, you can set the CONFIG_PATH environment variable to the absolute path to the directory containing the conf.php file. This can be done in your web server's virtual host config, the PHP config, or in the index.php, if you choose to customize it.

Note that your PHP process will need read access to the configuration file, wherever it may be.

CONFIG_PATH example

Setting the value in an Apache Vhost: SetEnv CONFIG_PATH /var/lib/privatebin/

In a php-fpm pool config: env[CONFIG_PATH] = /var/lib/privatebin/

In the index.php, near the top: putenv('CONFIG_PATH=/var/lib/privatebin/');

Transport security

When setting up PrivateBin, also set up HTTPS, if you haven't already. Without HTTPS PrivateBin is not secure, as the JavaScript or WebAssembly files could be manipulated during transmission. For more information on this, see our FAQ entry on HTTPS setup recommendations.

File-level permissions

After completing the installation, you should make sure, that other users on the system cannot read the config file or the data/ directory, as – depending on your configuration – potentially sensitive information may be stored in there.

See our FAQ entry on permissions for a detailed guide on how to "harden" access to files and folders.

Configuration

In the file cfg/conf.php you can configure PrivateBin. A cfg/conf.sample.php is provided containing all options and their default values. You can copy it to cfg/conf.php and change it as needed. Alternatively you can copy it anywhere and set the CONFIG_PATH environment variable (see above notes). The config file is divided into multiple sections, which are enclosed in square brackets.

In the [main] section you can enable or disable the discussion feature, set the limit of stored pastes and comments in bytes. The [traffic] section lets you set a time limit in seconds. Users may not post more often then this limit to your PrivateBin installation.

More details can be found in the configuration documentation.

Advanced installation

Web server configuration

A robots.txt file is provided in the root dir of PrivateBin. It disallows all robots from accessing your pastes. It is recommend to place it into the root of your web directory if you have installed PrivateBin in a subdirectory. Make sure to adjust it, so that the file paths match your installation. Of course also adjust the file, if you already use a robots.txt.

A .htaccess.disabled file is provided in the root dir of PrivateBin. It blocks some known robots and link-scanning bots. If you use Apache, you can rename the file to .htaccess to enable this feature. If you use another webserver, you have to configure it manually to do the same.

On using Cloudflare

If you want to use PrivateBin behind Cloudflare, make sure you have disabled the Rocket loader and unchecked "Javascript" for Auto Minify, found in your domain settings, under "Speed". More information can be found in our FAQ entry on Cloudflare related issues.

Using a Database Instead of Flat Files

In the configuration file the [model] and [model_options] sections let you configure your favourite way of storing the pastes and discussions on your server.

Filesystem is the default model, which stores everything in files in the data folder. This is the recommended setup for most sites on single hosts.

Under high load, in distributed setups or if you are not allowed to store files locally, you might want to switch to the Database model. This lets you store your data in a database. Basically all databases that are supported by PDO may be used. Automatic table creation is provided for pdo_ibm, pdo_informix, pdo_mssql, pdo_mysql, pdo_oci, pdo_pgsql and pdo_sqlite. You may want to provide a table prefix, if you have to share the PrivateBin database with another application or you want to use a prefix for security reasons. The table prefix option is called tbl.

Note

The Database model has only been tested with SQLite, MariaDB/MySQL and PostgreSQL, although it would not be recommended to use SQLite in a production environment. If you gain any experience running PrivateBin on other RDBMS, please let us know.

The following GRANTs (privileges) are required for the PrivateBin user in MariaDB/MySQL. In normal operation:

INSERT, SELECT, DELETE on the paste and comment tables
SELECT on the config table

If you want PrivateBin to handle table creation (when you create the first paste) and updates (after you update PrivateBin to a new release), you need to give the user these additional privileges:

CREATE, INDEX and ALTER on the database
INSERT and UPDATE on the config table

For reference or if you want to create the table schema for yourself to avoid having to give PrivateBin too many permissions (replace prefix_ with your own table prefix and create the table schema with your favourite MariaDB/MySQL client):

CREATE TABLE prefix_paste (
    dataid CHAR(16) NOT NULL,
    data MEDIUMBLOB,
    postdate INT,
    expiredate INT,
    opendiscussion INT,
    burnafterreading INT,
    meta TEXT,
    attachment MEDIUMBLOB,
    attachmentname BLOB,
    PRIMARY KEY (dataid)
);

CREATE TABLE prefix_comment (
    dataid CHAR(16),
    pasteid CHAR(16),
    parentid CHAR(16),
    data BLOB,
    nickname BLOB,
    vizhash BLOB,
    postdate INT,
    PRIMARY KEY (dataid)
);
CREATE INDEX parent ON prefix_comment(pasteid);

CREATE TABLE prefix_config (
    id CHAR(16) NOT NULL, value TEXT, PRIMARY KEY (id)
);
INSERT INTO prefix_config VALUES('VERSION', '1.7.1');

In PostgreSQL, the data, attachment, nickname and vizhash columns need to be TEXT and not BLOB or MEDIUMBLOB. The key names in brackets, after PRIMARY KEY, need to be removed.

In Oracle, the data, attachment, nickname and vizhash columns need to be CLOB and not BLOB or MEDIUMBLOB, the id column in the config table needs to be VARCHAR2(16) and the meta column in the paste table and the value column in the config table need to be VARCHAR2(4000).

Cloud Storage Backends

Due to the large size of the respective cloud SDKs required for these, we didn't include these in the vendor directory shipped in our release archives. To use these in your manual installation, you will need composer installed and require the used library (see instructions below).

This is not required if using the dedicated container images that have these SDKs preinstalled.

Using Google Cloud Storage

If you want to deploy PrivateBin in a serverless manner in the Google Cloud, you can choose the GoogleCloudStorage as backend.

To use this backend, you first have to install the SDK from the installation directory of PrivateBin:

composer require --no-update google/cloud-storage
composer update --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

You have to create a GCS bucket and specify the name as the model option bucket. Alternatively, you can set the name through the environment variable PRIVATEBIN_GCS_BUCKET.

The default prefix for pastes stored in the bucket is pastes. To change the prefix, specify the option prefix.

Google Cloud Storage buckets may be significantly slower than a FileSystem or Database backend. The big advantage is that the deployment on Google Cloud Platform using Google Cloud Run is easy and cheap.

Using S3 Storage

Similar to Google Cloud Storage, you can choose S3 as storage backend. It uses the AWS SDK for PHP, but can also talk to a Rados gateway as part of a Ceph cluster.

To use this backend, you first have to install the SDK from the installation directory of PrivateBin:

composer require --no-update aws/aws-sdk-php
composer update --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

You have to create an S3 bucket on the Ceph cluster before using the S3 backend.

In the [model] section of cfg/conf.php, set class to S3Storage.

You can set any combination of the following options in the [model_options] section:

region
version
endpoint
bucket
prefix
accesskey
secretkey
use_path_style_endpoint

By default, prefix is empty. If set, the S3 backend will place all PrivateBin data beneath this prefix.

For AWS, you have to provide at least region, bucket, accesskey, and secretkey.

For Ceph, follow this example:

region = ""
version = "2006-03-01"
endpoint = "https://s3.my-ceph.invalid"
use_path_style_endpoint = true
bucket = "my-bucket"
accesskey = "my-rados-user"
secretkey = "my-rados-pass"

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