listmonk newsletter manager on an Apache server

Since we’re living in times of enshittification and you can’t trust newsletter services like Mailjet or Mailchimp anymore to be usable in a few years or months unless you are a company who can afford their services, it’s good to look for other viable options - like selfhosting a newsletter manager. I’m using listmonk for this as I found it is intuitive to use, fairly easy set up and the admin interface looks pleasingly non-bloated. You can simply install it with Docker. However, I was following this guide for installing it with the binaries. You should be able to have it up and running pretty fast with this guide, but it doesn’t say how to configure your Apache server for your listmonk installation.

My listmonk is running on the same server as my website and is accessible from a subdomain like https://newsletter.myparty.de. So I had to configure Apache as a reverse proxy that routes traffic coming to newsletter.* to the listmonk service which is running on port 9000 (if you followed the above tutorial).

First, in order to use Apache as a reverse proxy enable the respective modules:

sudo a2enmod proxy proxy_http

Next, create a seperate Apache config file with sudo touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/newsletter.conf and edit it with sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/newsletter.conf, pasting in the following configurations:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:9000/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:9000/
 
    ServerName newsletter.myparty.de
    ServerAdmin info@myparty.de
 
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
 
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =list.pracht-ev.net
    RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
</VirtualHost>

Now, we have to enable our new site: sudo a2ensite newsletter - and restart apache: sudo systemctl restart apache2. You also have to make sure, by the way, that you’ve got an A or AAAA record set up for the newsletter.* subdomain at your domain registrar, otherwise, in the next step, Certbot will complain.

So, enable HTTPS for your subdomain with sudo certbot --apache. Certbot will do everything for you and you should end up with a newsletter-le-ssl.conf file in your sites-available folder. Restart Apache again and make sure everything is running: sudo systemctl status.

listmonk should now be available under https://newsletter.myparty.de.

---

For reference, here’s what your config.toml should basically look like:

[app]
address = "localhost:9000"
admin_username = "Qwertzuiop"
admin_password = "1234567890"
 
[db]
host = "localhost"
port = 5432
user = "newsletter"
password = "ASdfGHJKLÖä#"
database = "listmonk"
ssl_mode = "disable"
max_open = 25
max_idle = 25
max_lifetime = "300s"
params = ""