vivekbhat / ansible-checkbox.io Goto Github PK

• Nginx Server:
  • Nginx is used to host the static content for the checkbox.io
• MongoDB Database:
  • MongoDB is used as the database for storing the data for the website.
• NodeJs/Express Server:
  • An API server keeps running on a different port and exposes a rest api for the static website to consume. Nginx uses reverse proxy to connect to this API server.
• How configurations are set?
  • Ansible on the ansible control machine will connect to the inventory servers with ssh and run the following roles:
    • node: Installs nodeJs on the remote machine.
    • mongodb: Installs the mongodb database and also pythin-pip and pymongo which are required by ansibles mongodb module.
    • nginx: Installs nginx server on the remote machine.
    • deployment: Clones checkbox.io, Create mongodb user & password, do an NPM install in the node directory, update the nginx config and restart it, run the node API server using forever.
      • After this step you should be able to open http://192.168.33.100/ and use checkbox.io .

Checkbox.io Repository

VM:
I provided a Vagrantfile with needed network configuration

Ansible control machine:
Ansible control machine is the box which has the provate key of the VM(s) and has ansible installed on it.

• Ansible installation instructions here

Provisioning the inventory and deploying checkbox.io:
To provision the inventory run the following command:

ansible-playbook --private-key=~/.ssh/nodes_rsa -u vagrant main.yml -e "GIT_USER=<unity_id> GIT_TOKEN=<github_token>"

• --private-key={{path to your VM(s) private key}}
• -u {{remote_user}}
• -e "GIT_USER={{unity_id}} GIT_TOKEN={{github_token}}"

Now you can use checkbox.io if you open this in the browser: http://192.168.33.100/
[Note: You can update the variables in ansible script (roles/deployment/vars/main.yml) to configure installation paths and mongoDb credentials and other application configurations]

checkbox.io deployment automation gotchas:

• Working with credentials is really difficult. You cannot store them as part of the ansible script and keeping them in ones environment variables adds a manual step in the process. I found passing them as command line arguments to be the best way to deal with them.
• Working with/modifying the config file for nginx was a little tricky. I think for that purpose using the template module provided by ansible makes things cleaner and easy.
• Creating credentials was also a little difficult and using the ansible module helped. The downside of this was we ended up installing python-pip and pymongo module as the ansible's mongo module had them as dependency.
• Working with and creating environment variables at the remote node is also very difficult. Ansibles environment attribute helped us out but it took us while to get it to work.

###Screencast

• Link to screencast: Enable video subtitle for description