Huckleberry - Welcome home

My personal Raspberry Pi (home server) management.

Built using Ansible.

Components

• ssh-keys to copy your public SSH key so you can connect securely without typing your password
• essentials installs a few useful server monitoring and common build tools
• dotfiles sets up the server dotfiles, including git configuration
• motd installs the nice "message of the day" greeting you can see above
• zsh sets up Zsh as the default shell (configurable via dotfiles)
• mosh installs the mobile shell remote terminal application
• python installs Python with pip and pipenv
• go installs Go
• rust installs Rust and Cargo
• ruby installs rbenv, rbenv-update and ruby-build which you can then use to install a Ruby of your choice
• node installs Node.js and npm
• home creates a default directory structure in your home directory
• shairport-sync builds Shairport Sync for wireless music streaming from your Apple device to your Pi via AirPlay
• media-tools installs useful media players, like mplayer
• hifiberry configures your Pi to work with the HiFiBerry DAC+ card

Preparations

There are a few things which you'll need to prepare. Here we go:

1. 💾 Prepare an SD card Huck-up automates server management using Ansible. Its playbooks are written with Raspbian/Debian systems in mind. If you don't have a Raspberry Pi operating system on an SD card yet, download Raspbian and install it.

   Note: On Raspbian the SSH server is disabled by default. After installing the image, insert the prepared SD card into your local machine and place an empty ssh file onto the boot partition to enable SSH.

2. 🔌 Get your Pi up. Push the card into your Pi and power it up.

3. 🔗 Connect your Pi. Your Raspberry Pi needs to be connected to your local network. Just hook it up to your router with an ethernet cable if you have one, or else configure WiFi.

4. ⚙ Install Ansible. On your local machine, install Ansible. Alternatively you can also run the huck-up playbook directly on your Pi.

5. 📦 Clone this repo… git clone https://github.com/pmeinhardt/huck-up.git && cd huck-up

Provisioning

Now it is time you adapt the service and deployment configuration to your needs.

We recommend you keep these versioned in your own fork of this repository.

• Right away, you'll want to edit base.yml to your liking and select the roles you need.

• Create a file named vars/private.yml and hack away. Values in private.yml take precedence over anything defined in default.yml. If you're fine with the defaults, just touch vars/private.yml and you're done.

• You should probably keep a backup copy of your private.yml in a safe place, e.g. in your 1Password vault or somewhere similar.

• Alternatively: You may want to encrypt your private.yml using Ansible Vault if you plan on keeping it in your repository. A brief description is presented in a separate section below.

Be sure not to commit passwords into public repos!

If you have made changes to your Pi already - in particular if it is available under a different hostname - update the raspberries inventory file or create a private copy that you pass to Ansible via the -i/--inventory option.

You can verify your Pi is reachable by running:

ansible --inventory=raspberries --ask-pass --args="/bin/hostname" raspberries

The default password is raspberry (make sure you change it).

To bootstrap your Pi, run:

./script/bootstrap # if you have not changed the default username
./script/bootstrap --user=USERNAME # otherwise

or, if running locally on your Pi:

# change the "hosts:" entry in base.yml to "hosts: 127.0.0.1", then run:
ansible-playbook base.yml --connection=local

This will get everything set up and you're good to go.

You might have to reboot your Pi for some changes to take effect, e.g. the HiFiBerry device tree setup.

You can rerun these commands from time to time in order to keep your Pi up-to-date.

A handy script to do that for you is available. Just run ./script/update.

Encrypting configuration files

If you keep application secrets in your configuration files, you can use Ansible Vault to encrypt them.

When you override the default variables for a deployment for instance, encrypt the variables file as follows:

ansible-vault encrypt vars/config.yml

This will prompt for a password and save the file as encrypted data. When running a playbook containing Vault-encrypted files append --ask-vault-pass, i.e. run:

ansible-playbook --inventory=raspberries base.yml --extra-vars=@vars/config.yml --ask-vault-pass

Creating backups

To come.