CW-ROLE

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CW-Role is an automation repository build with Ansible. It installs Nextcloud with your preferred settings from PHP over Redis until to the Nextcloud settings itself as far as it is possible and reasonable.

💡 Motivation

On my first installation of Nextcloud, I needed to reinstall it several times because I messed up something. Sure, most things then were also new for me. Anyway, it was a time-consuming act to reset and install everything new. Yes, today I know more and a better way to reset Nextcloud, but then I didn't know that.

So I thought can I or better say how can I automate this procedure. It occurred to me: There is something called Ansible. This tool was already on my list for review and learning it. The timing was never better, and so the journey began.

⚙️ Features

There are already some repositories with automated installation of Nextcloud. Most of them are only the Nextcloud installation itself with Apache and Ubuntu as base system – which I don't like, especially Ubuntu.

I try to be more focused on update reliability and security. So I decided to use Fedora Server with activated SELinux. Fedora Server can be updated frequently with new recent updates and even can be upgraded to the next release version with an inbuilt mechanic.

TLDR chosen OS:

• Fedora Server
• Regular Updates of the System
• SELinux activated
• Stable

I tried to find a good way between performance, security and also stability. So I decided to use NGINX, for performance and efficient. Redis for caching and even more performance boost. Nextcloud was decided to use because of the feature rich environment they have. Also, you can decide if you want to have the full-fledged O365 replacement or just a cloud server. As database backend, I use PostgreSQL 14 because it's also very fast and can be exactly configured to your needs. To handle the dynamic sites part of Nextcloud, I use PHP 8.1.

TLDR chosen stack (LNPP):

• NGINX for performance
• Redis for even more performance boost
• Nextcloud feature-rich cloud environment
• PostgreSQL for a reliable and fast database
• PHP 8.1 to handle the dynamic sites

🧰 Prerequisites

• Fedora Linux (Server)
• Ansible
• Base Knowledge about Ansible would be advantageous
• No fear from the command line

🏗️ Configuration

Luckily, you only need to focus on two files.

1st is in:

CW-ROLE/vars/main/task_vars/task_variable_list.yml

2nd is in:

CW-ROLE/vars/main/template_vars/template_variable_list.yml

The explanations of the variables are documented in the files itself. Here are direct links to it:

1st: task_variable_list.yml

2nd: template_variable_list.yml

Do not forget to add the hostname or ip adress of your host you want to install CW-Role. You can do this in the hosts file, which is in the root directory of the project.

Example:

[groupname]
192.168.1.13
192.168.1.37

[groupname2]
pro-cw-01
dev-cw-02

▶️ How to Execute

For execute the playbook you require, ansible installed, sure.

Keep in mind your Ansible machine OS doesn't matter that much, in turn, of the remote host, this should be Fedora Linux, else the playbook will not work.

# Fedora and other Red Hat derivates

dnf install ansible ansible-core

# Debian and friends like Ubuntu

apt install ansible ansible-core

If it's not available on your distribution, or it is a very old version, you can install it also with pip which I recommend doing it.

pip install ansible ansible-core

After the installation, you can execute the playbook with the following command:

ansible-playbook cw-role_playbook.yml

🗂️ Credits

Tool:

• Ansible

Software:

• Fedora Linux
• Nextcloud
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• NGINX

Contributions:

• LxWulf

License

MIT © LxWulf