selfhostedops-stack/HARDENING.md

~$ Hardening checklist

This is the non-negotiable baseline before real company data touches the box. Every item is copy-paste ready for Debian/Ubuntu.

1. SSH: keys only, no root

adduser ops && usermod -aG sudo,docker ops
mkdir -p /home/ops/.ssh && cp ~/.ssh/authorized_keys /home/ops/.ssh/ \
  && chown -R ops:ops /home/ops/.ssh && chmod 700 /home/ops/.ssh

/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/hardening.conf:

PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no
KbdInteractiveAuthentication no

systemctl restart ssh
# TEST A NEW SSH SESSION BEFORE CLOSING THIS ONE.

2. Firewall — four ports, nothing else

apt install -y ufw
ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 80/tcp 443/tcp 443/udp   # caddy (http/https/h3)
ufw allow 2222/tcp                 # git ssh
ufw allow 51820/udp                # wireguard (only if using --profile vpn)
ufw allow 22/tcp                   # your ssh (move it if you want)
ufw enable

Note: Docker's published ports bypass ufw INPUT rules — that's exactly why this compose file publishes only caddy, git-ssh and wireguard, and keeps postgres/redis on the internal network with no ports at all. Don't add ports: to internal services "for debugging" and forget them.

3. Automatic security updates

apt install -y unattended-upgrades
dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades

4. fail2ban (ssh brute force)

apt install -y fail2ban   # default ssh jail is enough to start

5. Vaultwarden specifics

• VAULTWARDEN_SIGNUPS_ALLOWED=false the moment your team is on board.
• Use an argon2 ADMIN_TOKEN (vaultwarden hash / see wiki), not a plain string. A plain one makes Vaultwarden print a NOTICE on every start. It is telling the truth.
• Never back up db.sqlite3 on its own while the container runs. The database is in WAL mode: recent writes live in db.sqlite3-wal and are not in the main file yet. Copy it alone and you get a backup that silently misses your newest users and entries, and you find out on restore day. Either stop the container first (see section 7), or take a consistent copy:

docker compose exec vaultwarden sh -c "sqlite3 /data/db.sqlite3 \".backup '/data/backup.sqlite3'\""

• Restore the backup somewhere else, once, before you trust it. A backup you have never restored is a belief, not a backup.
• The admin panel (/admin) is for setup — consider blocking it in Caddy afterwards:

vault.{$DOMAIN} {
	@admin path /admin*
	respond @admin 404
	reverse_proxy vaultwarden:80
}

6. Pin your images

latest is fine on day one, dangerous on day 300. Pin majors at minimum (caddy:2-alpine, forgejo:11, uptime-kuma:1 already are). Watchtower blindly auto-updating a password manager at 3 a.m. is how you get incidents — update deliberately: docker compose pull && docker compose up -d after reading release notes. n8n and Outline move fast; Vaultwarden occasionally has breaking web-vault pairs.

7. Backups (minimum viable, today)

# stop, snapshot volumes, start — cron it nightly until Episode 10 (borgmatic offsite)
docker compose stop
tar czf /backup/stack-$(date +%F).tgz -C /var/lib/docker/volumes .
docker compose start

Plus: enable your provider's server snapshots. Two clicks, saves your company.

8. What this list is NOT

Not covered here, on purpose (own episodes): 2FA enforcement per service, Netbird zero-trust mesh, central logging, CrowdSec, offsite borg. Baseline first. Perfect later.

CI: the two ways to hand your server away

Both of these look like shortcuts and both give anyone who can push a branch full control of the machine.

1. Mounting the host Docker socket into the runner. Every forum answer suggests it, because it works instantly:

volumes:
  - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock   # do not do this

A job can then start a privileged container on the host, mount / and read every volume on the box, including the password manager sitting in the next container. Use the docker-in-docker sidecar in compose.yml instead. It costs six lines and the jobs talk to a daemon that has nothing of yours in it.

2. An unrestricted SSH key for the deploy step. If the key in your CI secrets can run any command, the pipeline is a root shell with extra steps. Lock it to one command in authorized_keys:

command="/usr/local/bin/deploy-myapp",no-port-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty ssh-ed25519 AAAA...

The script receives the argument from the job in $SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND. Sanitise it — the example in examples/deploy-hello-ops.sh strips everything that is not a hex character, because it only ever expects an image tag. The deploy user needs Docker access, so the forced command is the thing containing it; without the forced command, membership in the docker group is equivalent to root.

Automation: the small door and the one file (episode 8)

Publish paths, not hosts. n8n needs a public address for webhooks that come from outside, and for nothing else. The site block in Caddyfile serves /webhook/*, /webhook-test/* and /webhook-waiting/* and answers an empty 404 for every other path, so the editor, the login page and the REST API are not part of the public surface. The check is one line:

curl -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' https://n8n.<DOMAIN>/rest/settings   # 404
curl -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' -X POST https://n8n.<DOMAIN>/webhook/<path>   # 200

/webhook-test/* only does anything while somebody has "Test workflow" open in the editor. If you never test against an outside sender, drop it from the matcher and the surface gets smaller again.

Senders inside the box should stay inside the box. Forgejo and Uptime Kuma reach http://n8n:5678/webhook/... over the docker network. No certificate, no published port, no trip through the public IP. Forgejo blocks private targets by default; FORGEJO__webhook__ALLOWED_HOST_LIST: "external,n8n" allows exactly that one name and leaves the rest of the block in place.

/home/node/.n8n/config is the whole credential store. It contains encryptionKey, and every credential in database.sqlite is encrypted with it. Lose the file and the database is landfill: n8n starts, writes a fresh key, the workflows still look fine, and the first run fails with

Credentials could not be decrypted. The likely reason is that a different
"encryptionKey" was used to encrypt the data.

The episode 7 backup covers the whole volume, so the key is in the snapshot. Confirm it instead of assuming:

restic ls latest | grep n8n_data/_data/config

If you set N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY in the environment, that value wins, the file is never written, and the key then has to live in your password manager and survive the box.

Keep the file nodes on a leash. N8N_RESTRICT_FILE_ACCESS_TO: /backup lets the digest workflow read the backup log and nothing else. Left unset or widened to /, a workflow, or anyone who can edit one, can read the encryption key from inside n8n itself.

Pin the image, pin the subnets. docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n:latest turns every restore into an unplanned upgrade. The ipam blocks under networks: do the same job for addresses: Compose hands subnets out in creation order, so a restore onto a fresh box can renumber them, and every mesh route that points at the old range stops working without an error anywhere.