Student Robotics' Ansible

This is the Ansible config for our servers.

Dependencies

• VirtualBox (or another virtual machine tool)
• vagrant
• ./scripts/setup.sh

Local development

Local testing is done using vagrant, which fully provisions a VM locally. Ansible is hooked directly into vagrant, such that a regular provision will run the playbooks.

Getting started

Spin up the VMs with:

vagrant up

On first run this will download the base OS images as needed, create the VMs in Virtualbox and then also provision them -- applying the ansible configuration. As a result this can take a few minutes.

Specifying the name of one of the machines (e.g: vagrant up sr-proxy) will do this for just that machine.

If you need to apply the ansible config again you can do this with:

vagrant provision

Accessing the VMs

Should you need SSH access to the machines you can do this via vagrant ssh <machine-name>. This will log you in as the vagrant user, which has passwordless sudo.

You may wish to configure a hosts entry for easily accessing the VM, for example to test any HTTP services they're running. Add the following line to /etc/hosts on the host machine:

192.168.56.56  sr-proxy sr-proxy.local
192.168.56.57  sr-compsvc sr-compsvc.local
192.168.56.58  sr-kitsvc sr-kitsvc.local

You'll then be able to access the machines as if they were hosted. For example visiting https://sr-proxy in your browser will serve you the SR homepage (though your browser may complain, correctly, about the TLS certificate not being signed).

More details

Mapping of these development VMs into Ansible's playbooks is handled via the Vagrantfile, see e.g: the ansible.groups mapping, from which vagrant will build the appropriate ansible inventory. This therefore needs to be manually kept in a state which reflects the production inventory defined by the hosts file.

See https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/docs/provisioning/ansible for more details on how Vagrant's Ansible provisioner works.

Deployment

Deployment is currently manual. Once changes are approved someone with access to the target machines (currently members of the Infrastructure Team Committee, though others could be added via this repo) will apply the changes manually.

To aid with this there is a script at scripts/apply. This should be run first with --check --diff to validate the changes and then without --check in order to apply them.