polkadot-ansible

Ansible scripts to deploy up to two Docker based polkadot validator nodes. No need for compiling and complicated dependency management :)

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Getting started

Prerequisits:

• VPS or dedicated server meeting the Polkadot/Kusama requirements (you might want to have a beefier machine as we're going to run two validators on one machine)
• ansible (2.11.6+)
• ansible-playbook (2.11.6+)

First copy the hosts.ini-sample to hosts.ini then:

1. Rename the two my_node_* entries to a name you like, also replace the <IP of your server> with the actual IP of your server
2. Copy/Rename host_vars/my_node_*.yml files to the same name you just called the host in the hosts.ini file.
3. Update the values in the host_vars/my_node_*.yml files, you always want to:
4. Update the node_name this is the node name your validator will show up with in the Telemetry dashboards
5. Update the polkadot_db_snapshot_url and polkadot_db_snapshot_checksum with the latest values from https://polkashots.io/
6. Update your stash_addr with your stash address. (If you don't know what a stash address is you probably don't want to run your own validator!)
7. Place an exported wallet.json and password file in roles/polkadot-claimer/files adding a -kusama or -polkadot suffix to the file name.

Deployment

If you feel adventerous you can deploy the whole server using:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini all.yml

This will execute the following roles:

• polkadot-setup
  • Setup Docker
  • Setup Journald
  • Setup motd (message of the day)
• polkadot-restore-db
  • Downloads the in the host_vars defined snapshot and unpacks it to the future db_path
• polkadot-validator
  • Starts the polkadot/kusama validators as docker containers
• polkadot-claimer
  • Copies the wallet.json & password files to the server
  • Setups a cronjob which executes a docker container that claims the staking rewards
• polkadot-rotate-keys
  • Rotates the session keys so you can use for the SetSessionKeys extrinsic
• watchtower (not run automatically, run using ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini setup_watchtower.yml)
  • Sets up a watchtower container which monitors upstream container image repositories for new releases and upgrades automatically.

You can also run the individual roles using the setup_*.yml playbooks instead of all.yml.

Polkadot upgrades

To upgrade to the latest Polkadot version you can simply restart the containers using the polkadot-validator playbook.

Notes

Monitoring is not yet covered in these ansible playbooks. Do NOT run a Polkadot/Kusama validator w/o proper monitoring or you will get slashed.

You should not use root user on the server, instead replace the ansible_user field in hosts.ini with an unpriviledged user (which has docker rights).