Setting up Mailman on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with Plesk

Its taken a longer while than I had hoped. I’m not exactly very experienced with Linux administration and had not done much in that area in the last couple of years.

But after neglecting my personal website for way too long, I decided it was time to update it. I got rid of the wordpress sites on it, and replaced one with a static wordpress export since I do not expect it to change much any time soon.

My own site wordpress site I converted into a Jekyll based site mostly because I like the fact that no dynamic language is required to serve it and because I find the idea of a website residing in a git repository comforting. I can revert changes and should something seriously break, I have an always up to date backup.

But since the virtual server I’m using to serve my websites is based on Ubuntu 24.04 with Plesk administration software, and mailman packages for Ubuntu 24.04 are not available I had to manually install mailman. I decided to use the docker version by maxking.

What follows are the steps I took to get Mailman 3 running on Ubuntu 24.04 with Plesk.

Configuring Plesk

1. Install nginx using the Add Components section in Plesk’s Tools and Settings
2. Create a subdomain https://lists.minimeta.de in Plesk and secure it with a Let’s Encrypt certificate using the Plesk SSL It! Extension
3. Turn off Apache for that subdomain so that nginx serves everything for that subdomain
4. Add the following config to Additional Nginx Directives:

location /static {  
  alias /opt/mailman/web/static;  
  autoindex off;  
  auth_basic "Restricted";  
  auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;  
}

location / {  
  uwsgi_pass localhost:8080;  
  include uwsgi_params;  
  uwsgi_read_timeout 300;  
  auth_basic "Restricted";  
  auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;  
}

Note: I’m protecting the subdomain with a password since this is my private mailing list and nobody needs to be able to see it except me. In other cases, the auth_basic lines would not be required.
To generate the password file run
htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/.htpasswd <username>
as root on your server. You cannot use the Protect Directory feature in Plesk since is seems to override the directives listed above.

Configuring the docker container

Basically, I followed the directions on the github page for maxking’s mailman docker containers. But instead of editing the docker-compose.yaml from the page, I created a compose-overlay.yaml file and placed it into the same folder as docker-compose.yaml.

The contents of this file are as follows:

services:
  mailman-core:
    environment:
    - DATABASE_URL=postgresql://mailman:<DBpassword>@database/mailmandb
    - HYPERKITTY_API_KEY=<hyperkitty-secret>
    - TZ=Europe/Berlin
    - MTA=postfix
    restart: always
    networks:
    - mailman

  mailman-web:
    environment:
    - DATABASE_URL=postgresql://mailman:<DBpassword>@database/mailmandb
    - HYPERKITTY_API_KEY=<hyperkitty-secret>
    - TZ=Europe/Berlin
    - SECRET_KEY=<django-secret-key>
    - SERVE_FROM_DOMAIN=lists.minimeta.de # e.g. lists.example.org
    - MAILMAN_ADMIN_USER=<admin_name> # the admin user
    - MAILMAN_ADMIN_EMAIL=<admin_email> # the admin mail address
    - UWSGI_STATIC_MAP=/static=/opt/mailman-web-data/static
    restart: always

  database:
    environment:
    - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<DBpassword>
    restart: always

Replace the variables in <> with your own…

Configuring mailman-web

To properly configure mailman-web, I placed the following settings_local.py file into /opt/mailman/web

# locale
LANGUAGE_CODE = 'de-de'

# disable social authentication
MAILMAN_WEB_SOCIAL_AUTH = []
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['lists.minimeta.de', 'localhost', 'mailman-web']

# change it
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = '<admin_email>'
DEBUG = False # Mailman-web did not work for me with this set to True

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
    'default': {
    'ENGINE': 'xapian_backend.XapianEngine',
    'PATH': "/opt/mailman-web-data/fulltext_index",
  },
}

Configuring Postfix

This took me quite some time to figure out, but with the help of this page, I finally was able to produce a working postfix configuration.

Here are the lines I added and / or changed in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

mynetworks = 172.19.199.3, 172.19.199.1
virtual_mailbox_maps = , hash:/var/spool/postfix/plesk/vmailbox regexp:/opt/mailman/core/var/data/postfix_lmtp
transport_maps = , hash:/var/spool/postfix/plesk/transport regexp:/opt/mailman/core/var/data/postfix_lmtp
relay_domains = regexp:/opt/mailman/core/var/data/postfix_domains

This is slightly different from the configuration proposed by maxking, but works together with the Plesk setup.

Running it

After all this, I started the docker container with
docker compose up -d
and restarted postfix with
systemctl restart postfix

I’m writing this down so I know what I do the next time I need this and in case someone else finds this helpful.