Configure Minion

Minion backend and frontend can be configured after installation. This document will explain how to configure them.

As a convention, Minion will look at /etc/minion/ and /home/user/.minion. In the second case, the user home directory is the user that runs Minion backend server.

Hostname Whitelist and Blacklist

As of Minion 0.3 release, Minion will blacklist the following IP addresses from scanning.

'10.0.0.0/8',
'127.0.0.0/8',
'172.16.0.0/12',
'192.168.0.0/16',
'169.254.0.0/16'

You can check the latest list from https://github.com/mozilla/minion-backend/blob/master/minion/backend/utils.py.

The effect of this is that Minion will refuse to scan any target site whose hostname falls in one of the ranges. For example, when Minion resolve the hostname localhost to 127.0.0.1, Minion will abort the scan because it is blacklisted.

To configure the blacklist and whitelist, you can supply a file called scan.json in either /etc/minion/ or /home/user/.minion/.

{
    "whitelist": [
        "192.168.0.0/16",
        "127.0.0.1"
    ]
}

In this configuration, we allowed scanning LAN network and localhost. This is useful when you are testing your own web application from home. However, 172.16.0.0/12 range is still restricted from scanning.

You can supply your own blaclist as well.

{
    "whitelist": [
        "192.168.0.0/16",
        "127.0.0.1"
    ],
    "blacklist": [
        "foobar.com"
    ]
}

In this example, foobar.com is not scannable. When we specify our own blacklist, we replace the default one entirely with our own. So we can omit the whitelist in our example.

Configure Backend

Here is the default configuration for the backend server (see https://github.com/mozilla/minion-backend/blob/master/minion/backend/utils.py)

{
    'api': {
        'url': 'http://127.0.0.1:8383',
    },
    'celery': {
        'broker': 'amqp://guest@127.0.0.1:5672//',
        'backend': 'amqp'
    },
    'mongodb': {
        'host': '127.0.0.1',
        'port': 27017
    },
    'email': {
        'host': '127.0.0.1',
        'port': 25,
        'max_time_allowed': 3600 * 24 * 7 # seconds in 7 days
    }
}

To configure the backend, supply all the options in a file called backend.json at either /etc/minion or /home/user/.minion.

The api/url is the full authority (hostname and port) of the backend server.

The max_time_allowed determines the life time of an invitation; by default it will remain valid for seven days.

Configure Frontend

The frontend is much simpler.

{
    'backend-api': {
        'url': 'http://127.0.0.1:8383'
    }
}

If the backend server is on a different server, then put this configuration in a file called frontend.json at either /etc/minion or /home/user/.minion.