Doublehops

Due to the team continually starting new projects that have different stack requirements, we decided we decided to build a Python script that would read a configuration file that contained which OS (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu), webserver (Apache or Nginx), database (MySQL, MariaDB) and PHP version (set to latest 7.x). The file also contains project hostname (local dev name only), IP address and local output path.

When the configuration file is run, it will create a full Ansible script in the output path will the correct playbooks for the chosen stack. The same scripts can be used to provision remote servers such as AWS EC2 instances. It really helps in getting the project started quickly.

The project can be found here: https://github.com/doublehops/ansible-builder

Over the Christmas break I took on the task of migrating my websites from Rackspace Opencloud to Amazon’s AWS. There were several reasons for doing so but the main ones were because of the ever increasing amount of services I’m using there through work that I want to include in my own projects. I feel I’ve been missing out. Also, the more I that my head is in the AWS ecosystem, the more I’ll learn and be able to pass on to my clients.

As my projects (roughly 7, including this blog) are all rather small, I host them all on the one server instance. This could be a nightmare to migrate but fortunately I had scripted everything with Ansible, making the process fast and straight forward. I first had to tweak my scripts to use PHP7 as I had no yet upgraded my Rackspace instance. By starting out I created a EC2 instance running Debian Jessie, updated .ssh/config with the right credentials and ensure that I could ssh in to the new server. Once verified that all was OK, I ran the Ansible script over the new server which automatically installed:

• Required services such as Nginx, MariaDB, PHP7 and miscellanous tools such as htop, git, vim, etc…
• All the Nginx hosts records
• Any Basic Auth protection I had created for some hosts and paths
• Each database and database users for each project (I’m not using RDS for these small projects)
• Cronjobs and associated scripts that the projects require – which include the onsite backups
• Created a second user that only has privileges to retrieve the backups to store offsite

From there, it was a simple matter of using mysqldump to export all databases from the Rackspace server, SCP them to the new server and import. I then zipped up the web root directory and SCP’d them across to the server also. Lastly came the SSL certificates that I needed to move across. Before long I had a fully functioning server created from scratch that included all sites, their data and full backups. I updated the DNS records to match the new IP address and I was done.

In an effort to streamline all work and learning that I do I have put together an Ansible script that will build a web server with Yii2 advanced application template framework ready to start development with the newly released Yii2 PHP framework.

After Vagrant is used to create the virtual machine with Debian 7, Ansible is called to provision the server with PHP5.5, MariaDB and Nginx. It will then setup to virtual host for Yii2 framework with both frontend and backend configuation.

The scripts are available on Github for anyone who wants to have a try with Yii2.

Over the last two months I have presented the advantages of using Vagrant and Ansible to the PHP melbourne and Melbourne Linux user groups and on both occasions it was well received. I demonstrated how development environments can be automated for teams to ensure that everyone is running the same software and at the same versions.

Getting development environments up and running for your current project can very time consuming on some occasions hard to debug when things are behaving strangely. If you have several developers running environments of Windows, Mac and Linux, getting each developer’s rig set to start work can be unnecessarily difficult. With Vagrant and Ansible, one person can easily script the configuration, allowing others to just run it to get the environment setup.

When talking with the Linux group I focused the talk about Ansible more on deploying to production servers (web, mail, etc..) which has no real need for Vagrant. However Vagrant is helpful here also because it allows you to test your Ansible scripts locally before deploying to production systems, saving time and money.

Just a 20 minute presentation is enough to give some examples and a live demonstration to show how easy it is to implement and why they should look at using these technologies in their own work.

My slides are available here and the working script is available on Github.

One of the reasons I love running Linux on my main laptop/workstations is that I have an ideal environment to develop web projects. However there’s been many developments in software that moves away from this model which I have grown to love, and that is running your dev environments in virtual machines.

Instead of running Apache (or Nginx), MySQL and PHP natively on my dev machine, I have found it’s now easier to setup and run dev environments in virtual machines that are configured specifically for a given project, which can be automated through server management scripts. Initially this sounds like additional work, and it is but it has several advantages:

• Custom environments for each project
• Easily deployable for other developers in your team
• No knowledge required for other team members.
• Scripts can be reused for staging and development environments.

What are Vagrant and Ansible:

Vagrant is software that allows you to easily build reproducible development environments for various operating systems. It runs on top of other virtual machine platforms such as Virtualbox but, among other things, creates a sync drive that is accessible to your local file system, allowing you to use you IDE as you would normally without the need to transfer files to the machine.

Ansible, like Puppet or Chef is a server management scripting language. However the learning curve is a lot simpler and doesn’t require any software running on the remote servers. It configures the hosts over ssh.

By combining Vagrant with Ansible, it’s very easy to create development environments for developers who are running any common operating system within minutes without having to manually configure their dev environments to suit their operating system.

I have created Vagrant/Ansible setup script which can be found on Github. This will configure a development virtual machine that will have installed the latest versions of Nginx, MariaDB and PHP on Debian 7.

I think it’s worthwhile for any development teams to investigate using virtual machines like this, especially where complex environments are required.