SKS OpenPGP Keyserver

Intro

This is a containerized SKS OpenPGP Keyserver using s6-overlay on an Alpine Linux base image.

Including improvements based on Óscar García Amor and Martin Dobrev derived forks of this repository.

Guide

The /var/lib/sks volume holds the key database, membership and sksconf files which should be mounted from a persistent storage source.

The container provides 4 long-running services under s6 supervision:

• sks-db - primary dependent service that terminates the container if it crashes
• sks-recon - SKS gossip peering process which only starts after sks-db
• sks-stats - generate DB statistics once an half hour by sending sks-db a USR2 signal
• sks-log-clean - execute db_archive against key and PTree databases 2 hours

Setup

Configuration

The entrypoint.sh script will make use of the following environment variables to setup the default sksconf config file and modify on restarts unless altered manually to no longer make use of the environment variables.

While other configuration options are available they are not managed at this time and would require editing the sksconf file directly.

Storage

The default persistent storage volume needed should be mounted to /var/lib/sks and will store the key (KDB) and ptree (PTree) databases along with the sksconf, membership and DB_CONFIG files.

If a keydump volume is mounted to /data/dump to the container and the key and ptree databases do not yet exist, the entrypoint.sh will begin the database build process automatically. The choice of path was made to ensure it was outside the normal SKS basedir path so as not to be opened upon restart if the database already exists and the mount has not been removed. Once the keydump has been imported this mount volume could be removed as it is only necessary for initial import.

Keydump

To be of much use the SKS keyserver requires an initial dump of the available keys to be imported. As the version of wget available within Alpine Linux does not fully support the necessary options to mirror a keydump source, an additional Debian base image has been made available in the keydump directory of this repostory.

This may be built using the following:

docker build -t sks-keydump -f keydump/Dockerfile keydump/

This image takes an optional environment variable of KEYDUMP_URL which defaults to cyberbits.eu but can be pointed to any web accessible URL to retrieve from.

Use of this is completely optional but can make retrieving an initial keydump relatively simple to populate a volume that can then be mounted to the SKS container for import.

Run