Wiredcraft DevOps - Static website generator and build flow (homework)

Table of contents

• Background
• System overview
• Repository structure
• Setting-up development environment

Background

The original homework task description can be found here.

System overview

In this project, I use a local Vagrant box for dev and stage environment. The developer local environment is UNIX based OS.

Once you follow steps at Setting-up development environment part you will end up with running locally Vagrant Centos7 box with following:

• Development and staging websites (dev an stage)
• Crontab jobs:
  • create new dev version on website every 15 minutes and push to Git
  • create new stage version on website every hour and push to Git
  • check for updates on Git every 3 minutes and deploy either dev or stage websites if needed

Vagrant box folder structure

• DEV website files are at /var/www/dev where we keep history of development versions and have two links: latest and previous

• DEV website files are at /var/www/stage where we keep history of stage versions and have two links: latest and previous

• Crontab to automatically make dev/stage changes working with project at home/vagrant/test-devops/push

• Crontab to automatically check and deploy dev/stage changes working with project at home/vagrant/test-devops/pull

Repository structure

.
├── Makefile    <--- Collection of useful commands 
├── ansible     <--- Ansible playbooks for server spawn (meant to be run from local against Vagrant box)
├── scripts     <--- Crontab scripts (meant to be run on the box)
├── vagrant_box <--- Vagrant configs 
└── website     <--- HUGO website

To learn about all possible Makefile commands please run make:

$ make

Usage:
  make <target>

Vagrant
  box_create       Create vagrant box and add it's ssh key and configuration to ~/.ssh/
...

Setting-up development environment

Please follow steps bellow to set-up local environment.

Local environment requirements

• Virtual Box 5.2.x
• Vagrant 2.2.x
• Python 2.7.x as default on your local
• Ansible
• GNU grep
• Perl 5.x

Local environment requirements setup:

Virtual Box, Vagrant, Python

Depending on your OS follow official documentation (google for it) and best practices to install this software

Installing ansible

• Make sure you have python and pip for version 2.7.x:

$ python --version
Python 2.7.12
$ pip --version
pip 8.1.1 from /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages (python 2.7)

• Install python core dev tools

$ pip install --user -i https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple/ setuptools pip virtualenv

# check it
$ which virtualenv
/home/ilya/.local/bin/virtualenv

• Create virtual environment for our project:

# navigate to our project repo
$cd /home/ilya/dev/test-devops

# crete python environment
$ virtualenv --system-site-packages --no-download .venv

• Install Ansible inside virtual environment

# activate venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) $ which python
/home/ilya/test-devops/.venv/bin/python

# install Ansible
(.venv) $ pip install --user -i https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple/ ansible==2.9.0

Initial Vagrant box setup

• First, we need to spawn a vagrant box with following commands:

# create a vagrant box
$ make box_create

# add following lines to `/etc/hosts` file using text editor of your choice
192.168.33.10 devopstest.com
192.168.33.10 dev.devopstest.com
192.168.33.10 stage.devopstest.com

# test ssh settings by connecting to the box
$ ssh devopstest.com

• Next, we need to provision the vagrant box with Ansible playbook (takes sometime depending on your internet network, if you have error Failure talking to yum: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: updates/7/x86_64 it's due to poor network, please rerun the playbook)

$ make box_init

• Check the box setup

By now you must have set-up the local environment. To check development and stage websites please click on links: dev or stage (NOTE: make sure your system network proxy has an exception for 192.168.* or simply turn proxy off)

• Configure make changes and deploy changes crontabs

$ make box_init_crontabs