nordsoftware-open-ops

This repository holds everything related to infrastructure/operations for all our open source projects. In a nutshell, we use Packer to build Vagrant boxes from a standard Ubuntu Server (or any other image if necessary) image. Packer then uses local Ansible provisioning to provision the software required in the box. The built boxes can then be uploaded to Atlas which makes them available to Vagrant. See "The provisioning process" for more details.

Guidelines

The master branch contains the build definitions for our public Vagrant boxes.

Requirements

Packer

• Make sure you have Packer installed
• Make an account on Atlas if you haven't done so already. Once you've done that, create an Atlas token by clicking your nickname in the menu bar, then Tokens. Add this token as an environment variable named ATLAS_TOKEN. Consult the Internet on how to do this for your operating system.

Usage

This section describes the steps you need to take if you want to fork this project and create your own Vagrant boxes. The master branch ships with a few base boxes that can be used as baselines when rolling your own:

• nginx-php-mariadb-nodejs a basic stack
• nginx-php good for generic library development

Packer

In this example we use the nginx-php-mariadb-nodejs box from the master branch. If you fork you'll want to rename the file etc. to whatever your new box will be named.

• Enter the packer/ directory. The paths in the Packer template are relative to the directory packer is run from so this step is important.
• Run packer validate nginx-php-mariadb-nodejs.json to verify that the configuration is valid
• Run packer build nginx-php-mariadb-nodejs.json to build the Vagrant box locally and push it to Atlas, or run packer push nginx-php-mariadb-nodejs.json to build the box in Atlas instead. You'll probably want to do the latter.

Vagrant

Once you have successfully built a Vagrant box you can create an initial Vagrantfile using vagrant init foo/bar, where foo/bar is the name of your organization and box. To reprovision the box, add this snippet somewhere in your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
  /path/to/oops/scripts/provision.sh development
SHELL

Then, open provision.sh and adjust the variables at the top of the file to match your environment. You can now reprovision the box at any time by running vagrant provision from your host.

The provisioning process

When a box is created and provisioned Packer starts with a standard Linux distribution image. It then uses shell provisioners to do the bare minimum required to get Ansible installed and working properly. This includes things like installing the VirtualBox guest additions, configuring sudo and so on.

The real provisioning is done by Ansible, and unless you have a very good reason not to you should adapt your Ansible playbook(s) instead of provisioning directly from Packer. See ansible/README.md for further details.

License

MIT