pilosus/dienstplan-deploy

Ansible playbooks for deploying dienstplan app

dienstplan-deploy

A collection of ansible playbooks for the dienstplan slack bot to help:

• provision a server from scratch
• set up the bot app
• deploy the app to the server

Install

• Clone the dienstplan repo, compile the jar as described in the documenation
• Clone the dienstplan-deploy repo at the same directory level as with dienstplan:

├── dienstplan
└── dienstplan-deploy

• Checkout to a separate branch if you plan to edit configuration files

cd dienstplan-deploy
git checkout -b your-branch

• Get Python 3
• Install Python requirements:

cd dienstplan-deploy
pip install -r requirements.txt

• Get a server (for a hobby project a DigitalOcean's Ubuntu with 1 GB Memory droplet will be just fine)
• Set up your ssh keys to the server
• Set up a domain/subdomain for the app to be resolved to your server's address
• Get a PosgreSQL 9.4+ server (or provision one with a playbook)
• Set up Sentry account
• Set up ansible's hosts file, e.g. in ~/.ansible/hosts:

[digital_ocean]
dienstplan ansible_host=YOUR-SEVER-IP-ADDRESS

Usage

Encrypt / descrypt vault values

See the docs

# encrypt
ansible-vault encrypt_string --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt 'String to encrypt' --name 'variable_name'

# decrypt specific variable
ansible localhost -m ansible.builtin.debug -a var="env_slack_token" -e "@vars/env.yml" --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt

Provision a server

1. Update vars/server.yml variables, e.g. server_domain_name, server_admin_email (see above how to encrypt/decrypt a variable), copy_local_key
2. Provision a server with Java, Nginx server, firewall, etc:

ansible-playbook --limit dienstplan playbook-server-init.yml --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts --user root --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt

(optional) Initialize a PostgreSQL database

1. Make sure DB credentials are set in vars/env.yml
2. Run the playbook:

# Run all tasks
ansible-playbook --limit dienstplan playbook-psql-init.yml --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts --user root --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt

# Run tasks with selected tags
ansible-playbook -l dienstplan playbook-psql-init.yml --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts -u root --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt --tags "db"

Initialize the app

1. Update vars/env.yml (encrypt your app's environment variables, e.g. DB credentials, Slack tokens, etc.)
2. Update vars/app.yml (Set app_version value to the correct version of the app that you've compiled!)
3. Run the playbook:

# Run all tasks
ansible-playbook --limit dienstplan playbook-app-init.yml --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts --user root --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt

# Run tasks with selected tags
ansible-playbook -l dienstplan playbook-app-init.yml --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts -u root --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt --tags "env"

Deploy the app

1. Update var/env.yml if needed
2. Update var/app.yml (do not forget to set the correct version in app_version)
3. Run the playbook:

ansible-playbook -l dienstplan playbook-app-deploy.yml --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts -u root --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt

Or simply pass in app_version as the command line option:

ansible-playbook --limit dienstplan playbook-app-deploy.yml \
  --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts \
  -u root \
  --vault-password-file ~/.ansible/.dienstplan_pass.txt \
  -e app_version=1.1.109

Gather facts about server

Get info about dienstplan server from the hosts file:

ansible dienstplan --module-name setup --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts --user root

Ping servers

Ping all servers of group digital_ocean from the hosts file:

ansible digital_ocean --inventory ~/.ansible/hosts --module-name ping --user root

Debugging

# Log in
ssh you@your-server

# Become root
sudo -i

# Check app's files
ls -lth /opt/dienstplan/

# Check service unit files
less /etc/systemd/system/dienstplan-server.service

# See service status
systemct status dienstplan-server.service
systemct is-active dienstplan-server.service

# Reload systemd daemon
systemctl daemon-reload

# Restart service
systemct restart dienstplan-server.service

# See service logs
journalctl -u dienstplan-server.service --no-pager --since today --follow

dienstplan-deploy's Issues

Docker container based deployment

Currently we are using lighweight setup with the systemd service running java -jar.
It would be nice to have docker container based deployments too:

1. Blue-green deployments with docker-compose and nginx for hobby projects
2. Simple public cloud lambda (DO, AWS)
3. Kubernetes service

Support Java system properties

Starting from the release 1.1.86 dienstplan supports extra configs that can be passed to the system props options -D.

Let's add support for it.

Bump ansible

We need to bump:

• Ansible
• Playbooks software where applicable

Crontab support for the bot release 1.1.86

The new release 1.1.86 supports background events processing.

We can support the new feature with systemd's real-time timers or a plain vanila cron.

P.S. Since we already rely on the systemd, it makes sense to use timers (see some more advantages here)