Amara Puppet

Configuration management for Amara

Overview

Vagrant is used to build the entire environment. A Vagrant config is used for the Puppet master as well as another multi-VM config for the nodes.

Puppet Master

The puppetmaster directory contains the Puppet manifests and modules. The vagrant file will build a Puppet master server.

Setup

vagrant up

Vagrant will import (if necessary), boot, and configure the Puppet master. Port forwarding is configured for the VM for ports 3000 (puppet dashboard) and 8140 (puppet). Once finished, you can access the Puppet Dashboard via http://localhost:3000/.

Application setup

To test the Amara application locally, create an entry in your local /etc/hosts with the following:

10.10.10.115 unisubs.local

This will use the local multi-VM application server.

*Note: You must use unisubs.local as the media URLs are setup for that hostname.

Nodes

Node (server or VM) functionality is divided into "roles" such as app, data, util, etc. A node may have one or more roles that are defined in YAML format in the file /etc/system_roles.yml.

For example:

- app

Each role defines multiple Puppet modules that get applied to the instance.

For setup, there is a multi-VM Vagrant file that contains VM definitions for each role.

Role: app

The app role contains the appserver and nginx modules. It will setup an application server powered by uWSGI and Nginx. Port forwarding is setup for port 8080 and 8000 to the instance.

To start an app instance:

vagrant up app

Role: data

The data role contains the rabbitmq, redis, and solr modules. Port forwarding is setup on ports 5672 (RabbitMQ), 6379 (Redis), and 8989 (Solr).

To start a data instance:

vagrant up data

Role: util

The util role contains the graylog2 module for centralized syslogging graphite for graphing, riemann for application stats, and sensu::server for Sensu (monitoring). Every node is also configured to forward logs to this instance. Port forwarding is setup for port 3001 to access the Graylog2 web interface, ports 2003, 2004, and 7002 for Graphite, 8081 for the Graphite web app, 8082 for the Sensu admin, and 5555 for Riemann.

To start a util instance:

vagrant up util

Role: jenkins

The jenkins role contains the jenkins module for continuous integration testing. Port forwarding is setup for port 8888 to access the Jenkins web interface. To access it, visit http://localhost:8888/ .

To start a jenkins instance:

vagrant up jenkins

Role: lb

The lb role contains the configuration for the Nginx-based load balancer. Port forwarding is setup for port 8180 and 8143 to access ports 80 and 443 on the VM. These ports are used to not conflict with the forwarding on the app server. You will also need to add an entry in your local /etc/hosts file to access the name-based virtual host for the Amara app. Add amara.local to /etc/hosts (or whichever is for your host OS) with the IP of 10.10.10.105 and then access http://amara.local:8180/ .

To start a lb instance:

vagrant up lb

Environments

The node environment(s) (dev, staging, production) are defined in the file /etc/system_environments.yml.

For example:

- dev

Appendix

General Notes

In order to do full multi-VM replicated environment testing, you will need the amara-puppet-private module. See below for details. However, you can still build an entire environment (everything but serving the app on http://unisubs.local) without the amara-puppet-private module.

Adding a new role

To add a new role, create a file names .pp in the config/manifests/roles/ directory with the following:

class config::roles::<rolename> {
  # puppet code goes here
}

Then add a role check in config/manifests/init.pp:

if '<rolename>' in $config::params::roles {
  if ! defined(Class['config::roles::<rolename>']) { class { 'config::roles::<rolename>': } }
}

If you need private configuration, then do the same steps above in the amara-puppet-private repo as well: role goes in amara/manifests/config/<rolename>.pp and check goes in amara/manifests/config/init.pp)

Adding a new environment (for the app role)

To add a new environment for the app role:

• Add another role check in config/manifests/roles/app.pp (see existing)
  • Note: by default, the unisubs module will try to do a checkout to the environment name (dev, staging, etc.). To use a different revision, set it in the role check for the project_unisubs definition. For example: project_unisubs {'myenv': revision => 'my-custom-rev',}
• Add another role check in amara-puppet-private/manifests/init.pp (see existing)
• Add the appropriate configuration options for the environment in amara-puppet-private/manifests/config.pp (see existing)

Amara Config

In order to use the private Amara config, clone the amara-puppet-private repo into the puppetmaster directory. The Vagrantfile will automatically mount the module in the proper place.

VMware Fusion

VirtualBox has not been the most stable for me so I use VMware Fusion when VirtualBox is not playing nice. In order to maintain consistency, I use the same networking for the VMs. I will put the configuration process here and hopefully have a script to set it all up sometime.

• (on Mac) Edit /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/networking and configure NAT address subnet for 10.10.10.0 (should be VNET_8_HOSTONLY_SUBNET)
• Create each VM (following the Vagrantfile base OS - either Ubuntu lucid or precise)
• Install VMware tools
• Install Puppet (using the PuppetLabs APT repo http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Downloading_Puppet#Ubuntu+Packages)
• Configure each VM networking (following the Vagrantfile for each node)
• On the Puppet master, cd into the shared directory and run the build.sh script to build the master
• Add a shared folder for the Puppet master to the amara-puppet/puppetmaster directory labeled as puppet
• To use the Amara Puppet modules add the following to /etc/rc.local before the exit 0 line:

while [ "`mount | grep hgfs`" = "" ]
do
    sleep 5
done
mount -o bind /mnt/hgfs/puppet/manifests /etc/puppet/manifests
mount -o bind /mnt/hgfs/puppet/modules /etc/puppet/modules
mount -o bind /mnt/hgfs/puppet/amara-puppet-private/amara /etc/puppet/modules/amara

• Then run sudo mount -a to bind mount
• Run Puppet on each -- should setup the same environment