NOTES.md

Notes

Collecting notes on how to do some things with the project using ansible. Our development environment is set up as follows: Vagrant uses Ansible to configure virtual machines that are created using Virtualbox. These 3 tools (Vagrant, Ansible, Virtualbox) work together to create a development environment that closely mirrors the way things will be set up in production. The Ansible scripts should be usable to configure the servers needed to run the application in production.

Getting a Vagrant environment

Getting your vagrant environment running should be fairly straightforward, as long as you have Ansible, Virtualbox, and Vagrant installed on your computer. The first step is to fetch the git submodules for this repo. So run:

hostcomputer:~$ git submodule init
hostcomputer:~$ git submodule updated

This should fetch the exact revision of ansible-common-roles this project depends on. The next step is to run:

hostcomputer:~$ vagrant up

This should take a few minutes as it creates and configures 4 virtual machines. Sometimes, this will fail with errors. I think this is some ansible/vagrant flakiness. If you end up with a machine that isn't fully configured, you can destroy a machine and rebuild it. So you could vagrant destroy db then vagrant up db to recreate the database virtual machine.

Rebuild the search index

There is an ansible tag rebuild_index that is tied to the rebuild search index task in the hallofjustice role. Running ansible-playbook with the rebuild_index tag argument will trigger a rebuild of the search index, as run through Django's manage.py.

In your dev (Vagrant) environment, the command looks like:

ansible-playbook -i provisioning/hosts.vagrant provisioning/site.yml -t rebuild_index -u vagrant --private-key=.vagrant/machines/site/virtualbox/private_key

Interacting with the database

You should be able to: psql -h 10.73.98.101 -U hallofjustice -d hallofjustice and enter test for the password to log into the Vagrant machine database from your host machine.

Running in DEBUG mode with Vagrant machines

From the vagrant "hallofjustice-site" machine, you can switch to the application account and run a server with DEBUG=True set in the environment (other env vars are automagically loaded via that account's .bashrc). Essentially:

hostcomputer:~$ vagrant ssh site
vagrant@hallofjustice:~$ sudo su - hallofjustice
(virt)hallofjustice@hallofjustice:~$ cd src/hallofjustice/
(virt)hallofjustice@hallofjustice:~/src/hallofjustice$ export DEBUG=True
(virt)hallofjustice@hallofjustice:~/src/hallofjustice$ ./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:9000

You should be able to view that instance of the site at http://10.73.98.100:9000. Now you can debug errors and view changes without having to mess with the default instance controlled by nginx and uwsgi.

Restarting the default instance of the site

The default instance of the site at http://10.73.98.100/ is being served via uwsgi and nginx, which is how the production version will run. You can use ansible to restart the default instance using the following:

hostcomputer:~$ ansible-playbook -i provisioning/hosts.vagrant provisioning/utils.yml -t website-restart -u vagrant --private-key=.vagrant/machines/site/virtualbox/private_key