vida-ansible

The Devops Repo for VIDA. These projects/repository started from a clone of the FireCARES project developed by Prominent Edge and can benefit from occasional selective syncing with the original repo.

Ansible Playbook that installs and configures these applications that are commonly used in production Django deployments:

• Nginx
• Gunicorn
• PostgreSQL
• Supervisor
• Virtualenv
• Memcached
• Celery
• RabbitMQ

Default settings are stored in roles/role_name/vars/main.yml. Environment-specific settings are in the env_vars directory.

Tested with OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x64

Getting Started

A quick way to get started is with Vagrant and VirtualBox.

Requirements

• Ansible
• Vagrant
• VirtualBox

git clone https://github.com/ROGUE-JCTD/vida-ansible.git
git clone https://github.com/ROGUE-JCTD/vida.git
cd vida-ansible
vagrant up

Wait a few minutes for the magic to happen. Access the app by going to this URL: http://192.168.33.15

Additional vagrant commands

SSH to the box

vagrant ssh

Re-provision the box to apply the changes you made to the Ansible configuration

vagrant provision

Reboot the box

vagrant reload

Shutdown the box

vagrant halt

Running the Ansible Playbook to provision servers

First, create an inventory file for the environment, for example:

# development

[all:vars]
env=dev

[webservers]
webserver1.example.com
webserver2.example.com

[dbservers]
dbserver1.example.com

Next, create a playbook for the server type. See webservers.yml for an example.

Run the playbook:

ansible-playbook -i development webservers.yml

You can also provision an entire site by combining multiple playbooks. For example, I created a playbook called site.yml that includes both the webservers.yml and dbservers.yml playbook.

A few notes here:

• The dbservers.yml playbook will only provision servers in the [dbservers] section of the inventory file.
• The webservers.yml playbook will only provision servers in the [webservers] section of the inventory file.
• An inventory var called env is also set which applies to all hosts in the inventory. This is used in the playbook to determine which env_var file to use.

You can then provision the entire site with this command:

ansible-playbook -i development site.yml

If you're testing with vagrant, you can use this command:

ansible-playbook -i vagrant_ansible_inventory_default --private-key=~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key vagrant.yml

Activating the virtual environment from vagrant

vagrant ssh
sudo su vida
workon vida

Development Considerations

When you install FireCARES using Vagrant, the default configuration will restart the Gunicorn process on every request so your server-side modifications should immediately show up.

For client-side changes, you currently need to manually run the collectstatic in order to update the static assets. You can run collect static from the firecares-ansible directory on the host machine using the following command:

ansible-playbook vagrant.yml -i vagrant_server --tags django.collectstatic

Generating CSS

This project uses LESS CSS pre-processor to generate CSS rules. To make a modification to a CSS rule, follow these steps:

1. Make the modification in the appropriate LESS file. For example: style.less
2. Use the lessc command to compile the CSS from LESS and pipe the output to the appropriate location lessc style.less > ../css/style.css.

Debugging in Pycharm

You can use Pycharm to put breakpoints and perform typical IDE debugging tasks. See this documentation for instructions

Useful Links

• Ansible - Getting Started
• Ansible - Best Practices
• Setting up Django with Nginx, Gunicorn, virtualenv, supervisor and PostgreSQL
• How to deploy encrypted copies of your SSL keys and other files with Ansible and OpenSSL