Cloudserve infrastructure

Testing

This repository comes with a test-ready setup to try out the complete site setup locally. It uses vagrant to accomplish this and create a locally available target host. Install vagrant on your system and to make tests repeatable also install the vagrant plugins vagrant-hosts and vagrant-hostsupdater, which will set a static IP for the vagrant host to be reachable under.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-hosts vagrant-hostsupdater

Additionally, since the test setup mirrors the production setup in that it makes use of subdomains for the individual hosted applications, the server needs to be reachable under a domain name, not just an IP address. For now this is most simply accomplished through editing the hosts file, e.g.:

192.168.56.2 ansible.test
192.168.56.2 git.ansible.test
192.168.56.2 links.ansible.test

This will allow you to reach the main domain under http(s)://ansible.test and sets up two subdomains that can be reached. Be aware that the hosts file does not support subdomain wildcards. You will have to specify each hostname individually or use a tool such as dnsmasq. Read more here.

Then you are ready to run the complete infrastructure setup locally, simply by executing ansible-playbook site.yml. You can of course pick and choose what should be executed with host limits, tags, group variables, and so on, but this should provide an easy way to see if a) the playbook is working as intended and b) what it does is useful.

Deployment

Most variables to be changed should be set either through group_variables or host_variables. For my deployment I have a production group under group_variables which houses both a vars.yml containing basic variables (like server_domain, caddy_email, etc.) and a vault.yml which houses everything that should ideally not be lying around in plain-text (individual container and database passwords for the various roles etc).

To create such a file you can do ansible-vault create group_vars/<group-name>/vault.yml or do ansible-vault edit group_vars/<group-name>/vault.yml to edit it.

Look into the default/main.yml files of the various roles to see which variables should be set or can be overridden. The README.md files of the roles should also carry enough information about the individual variables to make sense.