ansible-makigas-ops

This repository contains the Ansible playbook used for provisioning servers for running the makigas web site. This playbook is only used for provisioning; Capistrano is used for deployment at this moment.

Additionally, a Vagrant box for provisioning staging servers in order to test provisioning, deployment or backups is available.

Requirements

Ansible 2.2+ and a server to deploy to.

The control machine (laptop, desktop, workstation) requires Python 2.6+ and either a GNU/Linux flavour such as Debian or CentOS or any other UNIX OS such as MacOS X or FreeBSD. Windows is not supported for the control machine.

The managed machine requires Python 2.4+, OpenSSH.

To provision a Vagrant box, Vagrant is required. It will require a virtualization provider such as VirtualBox or VMware. The development team only uses VirtualBox, therefore that is the only supported platform.

Provisioning instructions

At this moment this playbook assumes the following:

• You must already have Python 2.6 / 2.7 installed. Ansible still doesn't support Python 3 on the target server, so even if your distribution comes with Python 3, you'll still require Python 2.
• You must already have an SSH service running on your server. Bonus points if you already have an RSA key installed so that you can connect without providing a password, but you'll be able to connect with password login.

Instructions:

1. Install third party roles: ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
2. Copy hosts file from template and modify it to the actual server IP or domain to configure:

• cp hosts.example hosts
• vim hosts

3. Copy variables file from template and modify it to the actual values for usernames, passwords, databases and directories to install in.
   • cp variables.yml.example variables.yml
   • vim variables.yml
4. Provision! ansible-playbook makigas.yml -i hosts --ask-become-pass
   • If you are not using RSA keys (why wouldn't you), add --ask-pass flag.
5. After deployment, you should add the user you connect via SSH from to the deployment group so that you can also deploy via Capistrano: sudo adduser [your username] [deployment.group].

Vagrant specific instructions

There is a Vagrant box configured with Debian 8.0. The configuration file already provisions the machine when vagrant up is executed for the first time.

Files overview

Ansible:

• makigas.yml: the playbook for provisioning servers.
• requirements.yml: roles required to install via Ansible Galaxy.
• variables.yml: provisioning variables; you'll probably won't find this, that's because...
• variables.yml.example: you are supposed to copy this file into variables.yml and set the values to the actual usernames, passwords and system information you want to use with the playbook and which you should totally keep private.
• hosts: the server IPs to install. This file doesn't exist either because you are supposed to bootstrap the example template.
• hosts.example: the template for the hosts file.
• roles/: custom roles for provisioning.

Vagrant:

• Vagrantfile: vagrant file configuration.
• data/: shared folder. It can be accesed through /vagrant in the VM.