Installing Signature PDF in Yunohost

Signature PDF is great. It allows you to do basic PDF annotations and digital signatures on said PDFS. It’s not quite a full ‘suite’ yet like Docusign and Sign Request, it seems to be only in French right now (it’s easy to figure out graphically) however, it’s pretty amazing for quick sign-offs. You can save your vectored signature (create it in inkscape, for example) and then just quick ‘stamp’ the pdf with your signature and download it. This would be an amazing quick tool for most SMBs yet most probably don’t know about it or pay too much for other tools that are more complex than they need. This is open source, very functional, and runs on your own server which is better than, say, uploading your sensitive documents to someone elses’ server before signing…

It is a ‘one-click install’ on Yunohost… However… it wasn’t quite ‘one click’ because it requires it’s own subdomain and won’t work directly on the base URL of your YH installation. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to do a subdomain in conjunction with Digital Ocean and YH. Here are the steps I performed to get it rolling:

Set up DNS Records In Digital Ocean

1. Go to networking
2. Go to your YH domain
3. add in these records like this:

sign.domain.com

In the DNS section of this new domain it will give you some recommended DNS records to make it legit.

A RECORDS
hostname | will direct to | TTL

sign | your server | 300 (change back to 3600 later)

*.sign | your server | 300 (change back)

CAA RECORD
Hostname | Authority | Tag | Flags | TTL

sign | letsencrypt.org | issue | 128 | 300 (change back to 3600 later)

Now let that start to propagate through the internet and let’s do the second step

Setup Subdomain in Yunohost

From your home dashboard:

1. Domains
2. + Add Domain button
3. “I already have a domain” radio dial
4. Enter ‘sign.domain.com’ using your domain for domain.com
5. “Add” button
6. Wait while it processes a while

Now your sub-domain is setup in YH, the records on your server are pointing to it, but it doesn’t have encryption yet (SSL Cert). The domain must be fully propagated for that to work.

Setup Lets Encrypt Certificate for Sub-domain

From your home dashboard in YH:

1. Domains
2. select your new sign.domain.com subdomain
3. SSL Certificate (white button with lock)
4. If the green “Install a Let’s Encrypt certificate” is clickable click it, if not:

• in a terminal, try ping sign.domain.com and see if it gets a bounce back. If not, you probably have to wait longer
• in a terminal try dig sign.domain.com to see if your domain shows up paired with an IP address, SSL cert installation ‘should’ work
• Also check ports 80 and 443 are open for sign.domain.com in this tool

With all the above checking as ‘ok’, and after waiting 5 or 10 minutes and it still isn’t clickable, I found once that logging out of the YH admin or doing a control f5 refresh helped. For me, one time it took only 10 minutes to propogate and another time it took about 1 hour….

After clicking it will ask “Are you sure you want to install a Let’s Encrypt certificate for this domain?” which you will obviously approve. If all goes well it will say ‘Great! You’re using a valid Let’s Encrypt certificate”.

No point continuing until you have your SSL so get coffee and a lunch and proceed to app installation after that.

Installing SignaturePDF App in Yunohost

Now that your sub-domain and SSL certificates are set up, you are readying to install SignaturePDF. From your YH home dashboard:

1. Applications
2. + Install
3. Search “sign” – you should see ‘Signaturepdf – Free PDF signing software’ show up
4. Click the green + Install button
5. Select your newly-created subdomain from the dropdown in the ‘Choose the domain where this app should be installed’ field.
6. For SignaturePDF, probably you’ll want to expose this to the outside world since you might want non-users to be able to use it? It’s a personal choice and may require re-thinking later, but for now I’m installing with ‘yes’ selected here.
7. At bottom of summary page, if all looks good ‘install’ button

If all goes well you should see a success message. Test your new Send app by going to sign.yourdomain.com.