jbinto/jbinto.ca-ansible-playbook

jbinto/jbinto.ca-ansible-playbook

Forked from jbinto/ansible-ubuntu-rails-server. See there for more detailed (but perhaps outdated) docs.

This playbook is used to build jbinto.ca, which hosts several of my sites/applications.

Current state

BROKEN/WIP. I'm tackling a couple of things at once.

• 1) Being able to deploy to multiple environments (staging/production).
  • This requires factoring out everything environment-specific into host_vars.
  • Originally I tried to do production and staging git branches, but that doesn't make sense for this application. Instead, what I'll probably do is master, live-staging, and live-production. Do work on master, as it is applied, merge into the other branches.
• 2) Being able to deploy multiple Rails apps.
  • Many of the variables were named naïvely, assuming there would only be one instance. I've prefixed everything.

Software

• Ubuntu 14.04.1 (this is the only pre-requisite)
• Postgresql 9.3
• rbenv
• ruby 2.1.5
• Phusion Passenger + nginx from Phusion's apt repo
• Papertrail logging (TODO)

Sites/web applications

• Prepares multiple nginx vhosts for Rails apps, ready for deployment with cap:
  • 416.bike
  • ttchotline.uniquename.org (for now, until we get a real domain)

Cheatsheet

See detailed instructions below.

Pre-requisites

• Install pip via homebrew
• Install required Python modules (ansible, dopy, passlib, etc):

sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Spin up a new DigitalOcean droplet

dopy (python, ansible) and tugboat (ruby, for command-line support only) currently use DigitalOcean APIv1. This will have to be updated to use APIv2 at a later date.

Get your legacy API key at http://cloud.digitalocean.com/api_access and set magic environment variables DO_CLIENT_ID and DO_API_KEY.

Configuration (droplet size, region, etc.) available in vars/digitalocean.yml. You will be interactively prompted to enter the hostname.

To provision, run:

ansible-playbook provision-digitalocean.yml -i local 

Droplet post-requisites

• A new DNS zone is created for each droplet you create, and is handled by DigitalOcean's DNS. This may not be exactly what you want. Configure your DNS manually if necessary.

• Generate a crypted Linux/root password for your environment:

python support/generate-crypted-password.py

Paste the crypted password into the password field (in host_vars/{{HOST}}/defaults.yml)

• Add the IP address of your new droplet to hosts-production or hosts-staging. You can find it at: https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets

Preparing .env (dotenv) from examples for each site

An example site-bikeways.env.yml file is provided in examples/. All environment-specific configuration for the application is stored here, including but not limited to secrets.

Change it as necessary, and copy to host_vars/{{HOST}}/site-bikeways.env.yml before attempting to run the build-server playbook.

The wildcard *.env.yml file itself is under gitignore, as these files could contain sensitive credentials and API keys.

Building (or upgrading) server on DigitalOcean

ansible-playbook build-server.yml -i $INVENTORY -u $USER -K -vvvv

Where $INVENTORY is one of: hosts-production, hosts-staging

And $USER is one of: root (first run only), staging0, production0.

To only run a specific tag, add --tags, e.g.:

ansible-playbook build-server.yml -i $INVENTORY -u $USER -K -vvvv --tags site-bikeways

Deploying a Rails site

This playbook only prepares the execution environment (e.g. Passenger, nginx, Postgres, dotenv).

From here, it's time to continue with a Capistrano deployment, e.g. rails4-sample-app-capistrano.

Once all configured (config/deploy/*), it should be as sample as cap staging deploy.

Adding a new Rails site

TODO, but basically clone roles/site-bikeways and add the new role to build-server.yml

Configuration

Hosts are defined in two separate inventory files: hosts-production and hosts-staging.

All roles contain content that is common between execution environments. Elements that differ should be factored out into Ansible variables.

Host-specific configuration is available in host_vars/{{HOST}}/*. All files within the host directory are loaded.

Gotchas / caveats / issues

• After upgrading the kernel (and definitely after the first installation), a reboot may be necessary. As of right now, the only way to do so is to ssh manually into the box. This is no big deal, as the SSH key is already set up.

• After upgrading nginx, Passenger, or ruby version, nginx must be restarted. (XXX: how?)