RapidFTR Chef Repo

This code supports automated deployment for RapidFTR. It's targeted at enabling anyone with a Linux server to set up their own production-ready instance of RapidFTR with as little manual setup as possible. The implementation is chef-based, utilizing chef-solo.

At the moment automated deployment is only supported on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but we're interested in supporting other Linux distributions and POSIX OSs. (If you want to test and add support for another, see "Contributing" and "Other Platforms" below.)

The most up-to-date version of this code is currently at https://github.com/rapidftr/RapidFTR-chef-repo.

The RapidFTR server application repository can be found at https://github.com/rapidftr/RapidFTR.

If you have any questions about anything here, please ask on the RapidFTR Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/rapidftr

Main Production Server Setup

Here are the steps required for a production deployment:

Start with a publicly accessible server (or one that will later be made publicly accessible) running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. (Linode and Amazon EC2 are both good for this.)

• SSH into your server:

• If you're logged in as root and don't yet have an admin account (which is likely on Linode but not otherwise):

  adduser admin # When prompted, provide a strong password. You can leave everything else blank.
  usermod -a -G sudo admin
  

  • Now log out and log back in as admin.
  • TODO: remove root's ability to log in?

• Now download and untar this repository.

    wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/downloads/rapidftr/RapidFTR-chef-repo/chef-repo-6b2158e.tgz
    mkdir chef-repo
    cd chef-repo
    tar xzf ../chef-repo-e58a0cc.tgz
    sudo ./setup-ubuntu.sh
  

  • Say yes when prompted to install packages.

  • Answer 'default' when prompted for a role.

  • Respond to prompts for further information, reading the prompts carefully.

• If you haven't already, copy SSL certificate files into the locations you provided during the previous step. See below for help generating a certificate.

• Now run chef-solo to install the application and its dependencies.

  sudo chef-solo # This will take an uncomfortably long time (ie, more than 10 minutes).
  

You should be all set. Open your browser to https://YOURSERVER/ and login with username and password "rapidftr." If you're really planning to use this instance, change your username and password now.

Backup Production Server Setup

You can optionally provision a second server that can serve as a backup instance in case the first instance crashes. It will be configured to pull all data from the main instance every five minutes.

To configure a backup instance, follow the same instructions as above, but when asked what role the server should have, answer 'backup' instead of 'default.' The interactive setup script will instruct you to take some additional manual steps to get the backup instance configured correctly.

Generating an SSL certificate

Instructions for creating and self-signing a certificate can be found at http://www.akadia.com/services/ssh_test_certificate.html.

Briefly, here are the commands we've used:

	openssl genrsa -des3 -out test.key 1024                        # generate private key
	openssl req -new -key test.key -out test.csr   # generate certificate signing request
	cp test.key test.key.org
	openssl rsa -in test.key.org -out test.key               # remove passphrase from key
	openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in test.csr -signkey test.key -out test.crt  # self-sign

Contributing

We use bundler and rvm to control the ruby environment we are developing in. These instructions will assume that you have already installed rvm (https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/).

To develop on the deployment platform:

• Clone this repository.

  git clone https://github.com/rapidftr/RapidFTR-chef-repo.git
  

• Set up the rvm gemset we expect, and cd in to your clone. You should see a message from rvm prompting you to accept our ruby interpreter version and gemset.

    rvm install 1.8.7-p302 # if you don't have it
    rvm use 1.8.7
    rvm gemset create RapidFTR-chef-repo
    cd RapidFTR-chef-repo
  

• Run bundler. (rvm adds the bundler gem to gemsets by default, so you should have it already.)

  bundle install
  

• Add the vagrant box that we use as our VM base. There's more info about boxes on Vagrant's site (http://vagrantup.com/docs/getting-started/boxes.html).

    vagrant box add lucid32 http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
  

• Create the VM and run the tests against it.

    rake vagrant:full
  

  That will boot up a virtual machine running Ubuntu, "provision" the machine using the chef-repo rooted one directory up from the test directory (ie, using your working copy of the cookbooks), and run test/*_spec.rb. This can take a while, but may need some input to approve network access the first-time, depending on your firewall setup.

• Run:

  rake vagrant:setup\_ssh system\_spec
  

  to re-run the tests if you've made manual changes in the tests or the server.

• Run

  rake vagrant:reprovision
  

  to re-run your local cookbooks on the running VM. (Note that won't start from a clean state, but since starting from a clean state takes a long time it might be worthwhile for faster feedback.)

Testing on EC2

For a more realistic test, you can use Amazon EC2. Set up the following environment variables:

• AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY_ID
• AMAZON_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• RAPID_FTR_IDENTITY_FILE

Why Chef Solo?

We use chef-solo because usage of chef-server (or the Opscode Platform) assumes central management of servers, whereas it's a goal of RapidFTR that anyone should be able to set up their own instance.

Other Platforms

While we've developed for and tested on Ubuntu 10.04, we want RapidFTR to work on other Linux distributions. We've created continuous integration builds using other AMIs, but at this time no one has yet undertaken the work to get things passing. See the RapidFTR Deployment continuous integration builds for current state.