Setting Up Private Pastebin with Privatebin

Pastebin is a very useful utility for sharing debug and error mesasges online. Privatebin is a self-hosted alternative that has multiple security options like burn after read mode and uses 256bit AES-GCM for all messages.

Linux installation:

Step 1. Make sure Docker and Docker Compose are installed and setup. Guide

Step 2. Make a directory for privatebin configs.

mkdir -p /home/(username)/docker/privatebin

Step 3. Configure docker-compose.yml for privatebin.

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46

#docker-compose.yml
version: "3"
services:
  privatebin:
    image: privatebin/nginx-fpm-alpine:latest
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    container_name: privatebin
#    labels:								#optional Traefik config
#      - "traefik.enable=true"						
#      - "traefik.http.routers.privatebin.rule=Host(`(domain)`)"	#replace (domain) with domain
#      - "traefik.http.routers.privatebin.tls=true"
#      - "traefik.http.services.privatebin.loadbalancer.server.port=8080"
#      - "traefik.http.routers.privatebin.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - ./privatebin-data:/srv/data
      - ./conf.php:/srv/cfg/conf.php:ro
      - ./php.ini:/etc/php7/php.ini:ro
    networks:
      - privatebin
    restart: always

  privatebin_db:
    image: mariadb:latest
    container_name: privatebin_db
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=	#set mysql root password
      - MYSQL_USER=privatebin
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=		#set mysql user password
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=privatebin
#    labels:			#optional Traefik config
#      - "traefik.enable=false"
    volumes:
      - privatebin_db:/var/lib/mysql
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    networks:
      - privatebin
    restart: always

volumes:
  privatebin_db:

networks:
  privatebin:

Step 4. Configure conf.php which stores the main configuration settings for Privatebin.

conf.php

• Configure website title on line 7
• Configure file upload on line 19
• Configure size limit on line 32(php.ini requires Step 5)
• Configure forwarded headers on line 129 by uncommenting ;
• Configure MYSQL_PASSWORD on line 165 from docker-compose.yml
• Other configurations maybe changed according to preferences

Step 5. Configure php.ini if file upload is enabled.

• Configure upload_max_filesize on line 841
• Configure post_max_size on line 689

php.ini

Step 6. Make directory for metadata and set required permissions.

mkdir -p /home/(username)/docker/privatebin/privatebin-data
chown 65534:82 /home/(username)/docker/privatebin/privatebin-data

Step 7. Start Privatebin service and connect to url on port 8080.

docker-compose up -d

Step 8. To update or make changes to service make sure to rebuild.

destroys containers without affecting volumes

docker-compose down

pulls new docker images

docker-compose pull

starts docker containers in the background

docker-compose up -d