Auth.php not pulling domains from VIRTUAL_HOST environmental variable

Flamby · April 14, 2024, 2:48pm

The issue I am facing:
Kept on getting CORS errors from my keepalived VIP.
When manually adding that IP to the $AUTHORIZED_HOSTNAMES array in auth.php, it works fine - no issues.
When setting that IP as a variable in /etc/environment, CORS errors get thrown.

I'm trying to get the PiHole type in homer to work with the PiHole's API, but it only works when I manually add the Virtual IP manually in the auth.php file.

Tried adding the "add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';"-line that I see on almost every other forum, but had no luck. The errors do go away, but no status is being displayed on the homer dashboard.

Details about my system:
Raspberry Pi 5, running nginx, homer, pihole, pivpn, keepalived.

What I have changed since installing Pi-hole:
I'm not using lighttpd as a web server, only nginx.
I've moved the web directory from its usual www-data directory and into /usr/share/nginx/pihole.
PiHole works as it should, and I have no problems with its setup or functionality, only this CORS error that keeps bugging me.
I've set custom ports for every service.
Nothing is run in docker, everything is "bare-metal" as it were.

Not well versed in network applications or the settings that run them, just toying around and learning while winging it

rdwebdesign · April 14, 2024, 4:59pm

That's why it is not working.

VIRTUAL_HOST is an environment variable used only in Docker Pi-hole:

Variable	Default	Value	Description
`VIRTUAL_HOST`	`${HOSTNAME}`	`<Custom Hostname>`	What your web server 'virtual host' is, accessing admin through this Hostname/IP allows you to make changes to the whitelist / blacklists in addition to the default 'http://pi.hole/admin/' address

Also, this variable must be set inside PHP environment to be used in the web interface.

Docker Pi-hole has code to add the variable value into lighttpd configuration:

github.com

pi-hole/docker-pi-hole/blob/91ff5662c4153f24be7bf4db548e7e015b60b02f/src/s6/debian-root/usr/local/bin/bash_functions.sh#L361-L393


      
          setup_web_php_env() {
              local config_file
              config_file="/etc/lighttpd/conf-available/15-pihole-admin.conf"
              # if the environment variable VIRTUAL_HOST is not set, or is empty, then set it to the hostname of the container
              VIRTUAL_HOST="${VIRTUAL_HOST:-$HOSTNAME}"
          
              for config_var in "VIRTUAL_HOST" "CORS_HOSTS" "PHP_ERROR_LOG" "PIHOLE_DOCKER_TAG" "TZ"; do
                local beginning_of_line="                    \"${config_var}\" => "
                if grep -qP "^$beginning_of_line" "$config_file" ; then
                  # replace line if already present
                  sed -i "/${beginning_of_line}/c\\${beginning_of_line}\"${!config_var}\"," "$config_file"
                else
                  # add line otherwise
                  sed -i "/bin-environment/ a\\${beginning_of_line}\"${!config_var}\"," "$config_file"
                fi
              done
          
              echo "  [i] Added ENV to php:"
              grep -E '(VIRTUAL_HOST|CORS_HOSTS|PHP_ERROR_LOG|PIHOLE_DOCKER_TAG|TZ)' "$config_file"

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But in bare metal installations we don't use this variable.

If you want to use the variable inside PHP environment using a different web server (nginx) you need to configure the variable using nginx config files.

Flamby · April 14, 2024, 5:21pm

Ah, that explains why CORS_HOSTS also didn't work.

Yeah, I read about setting the variable in a lighttpd config file in a few posts.

Alright, I'll do some more looking around on the php-side of things, thanks for pointing that out.