static-auth-rocket requires a configuration file to run. The executable file contains a template configuration file that can be created using the make-config subcommand:

$ static-auth-rocket make-config

Running this command should cause a Rocket.toml file to be created in the current working directory.

Edit this file and make the appropriate modifications. Notably:

• htdocs is the base directory that will act as the HTTP server's root. The server will share all files within this directory.
• database should point to a sqlite database file that will be used to read the account database from. This file will be created by static-auth-rocket if it does not already exist.

The configuration parameters under debug section are used for debug builds, and the ones under release are used for release builds (which is the default when installing crates using cargo install).

Populate account database

To grant a new user permission access the server's contents, they must have an account in the database. There's no custom user interface for managing the account database -- any sufficiently recent SQLite database management tool will do.

The account database is stored in the accs table, where the account name is stored int he name column and a hex-encoded SHA2/256 hash of the account's passphrase is stored in the pass column.

The database is read at startup, which means that modifications of the database will not be picked up until the service is restarted.

Manual creation of accs table

To manually create the accounts database the following query can be used:

CREATE TABLE accs (
  name TEXT UNIQUE,
  pass TEXT NOT NULL,
  CHECK (length(pass) == 64)
);