Screenshot of Safari window showing minimalistic Pocket ID website
Pocket ID in all its glory

It's been almost a month since I announced Debian PPA, and I managed to keep it somewhat up to date (here's the changelog for anyone curious). Recently Jloh pointed me at Pocket ID I haven't heard of before, and I decided to give it a try—if only to give those pesky passkeys a fair go. The catch is, I'm allergic to needlessly running stuff in Docker containers, especially if it's just a single binary with accompanying systemd service. (If you aren't allergic, be sure to check this post by Luka). I found this great post by Lucas Pocket-ID: Bare Metal Installation on Debian, but I didn't like too many manual steps, especially the upgrade process.

I decided to grab Pocket ID's binary from their GitHub project and surround it with Debian cushions, so to speak. In essence, I built a Debian package that handles unprivileged user creation, all of the folder structure, its ownership, config file, systemd service etc. Having it done the Debian-way, upgrades are going to be trivial from there on.

Installation is as easy as adding my Debian PPA and:

apt update
apt install pocket-id

A few things worth noting:

  • This package is not building Pocket ID, it only covers Golang binary already built by the upstream
  • Config file resides in /etc/default/pocket-id where all of the relevant environment variables can be provided
    • This will need a bit more work, cause thus far I just shamelessly took one provided by Lucas (thanks man!)
  • SQLite is used by default and along with the rest of the data lives in /var/lib/pocket-id
    • This folder will remain on package removal unless the package is being purged

So far I've been pleasantly surprised by the rather flawless setup. I'm going through the supported clients and will give it a go in the upcoming days.