RU Hacks Vagrant

This is used to deploy updates/changes to production as well as set up a development environment locally for use.

There are two machines defined in the Vagrantfile.template. One for deploying to DigitalOcean using the Vagrant plugin vagrant-digitalocean as a provider to manage droplets on DigitalOcean. The other machine is for local development.

Table of Contents

• Setup
• Development
  • Quick Start
  • Managing the nginx server
    • Adding applications
    • Issues with Running Local Copy
    • Reference
  • Managing applications
    • Note
    • Administration
    • States
• Production
  • Vagrantfile Modifications
  • Deploying
• Issues

Setup

1. Before setting up Vagrant, you will need to install VirtualBox. Go to this page and pick the appropriate installation from version 5.1.30.

2. Install Vagrant by geting the installation here.

3. Get the Ubuntu Xenial box by running vagrant box add ubuntu/xenial --box-version=20171116.0.0 in terminal

4. Install the Vagrant plugins vagrant-digitalocean and vagrant-hostmaster by running the following in terminal:

   vagrant plugin install vagrant-digitalocean
   vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager
   

   For more details on these plugins, visit their Github repositories:

   • vagrant-digitalocean
   • vagrant-hostmanager

5. Make a copy of Vagrantfile.template and rename it Vagrantfile

6. (Optional) Modify Vagrantfile for managing DigitalOcean droplet (See Production for more details)

7. Run vagrant up ruhacks-local to setup the vm for development

Development

Quick start

Once you have setup according to the instructions above then you can do the following:

• ssh into the machine by running vagrant ssh ruhacks-local
• shut the machine down by running vagrant halt ruhacks-local
• restart the machine by running vagrant reload ruhacks-local
• access the application by going to http://ruhacks.local

Managing the nginx server

Adding applications

1. To add other applications for access on host, modify the default.local file in the .provision folder. Then ssh into the machine and run

   sudo cp /vagrant/.provision/default.local /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
   sudo nginx -s reload
   

   for the changes to appear.
2. However there is one more step if you want to access it by domain name (i.e. *.ruhacks.local):
   • Go to the Vagrantfile and add the domain name to config.hostmanager.aliases
   • Run vagrant hostmanager ruhacks-local to update your hosts file
3. Now you should be able to access the application on host by visiting the new domain name

Issues with Running Local Copy

There is a known issue where when static files are updated they may not show up properly when served by NGINX. An example of this can be found here.

The solution is to go to the /etc/nginx/ directory and edit the nginx.conf file by changing the sendfile option to off.

Reference

If you don't know how to configure nginx, please check out the docs

Managing applications

Currently we're using PM2 to keep applications running in the background as well as starting up on system startup.

Note

When you ssh into the machine, you will notice that the pm2 processes are not run under the current user which you logged in as. When the machine was setup, it was done as root so to change to root user run sudo su to change user to root.

The name of a process will be its filename unless the --name option is provided. If the --name option is provided then the process name will be whatever is provided to that option.

Administration

• To view current applications processes run pm2 status
• To view output of applications run pm2 logs or to view a specific application output run pm2 logs <process name>
• To view pm2 status as a dashboard run pm2 dash

States

• To start an application, cd to the application directory and run pm2 start <filename> [--name <process name>].
• To restart an application run pm2 restart [<process name>|all]
• To stop an application run pm2 stop [<process name>|all]
• To remove an application from pm2 run pm2 delete [<process name>|all]
• To make current pm2 processes start on startup run pm2 startup - note this will reboot the machine

Production

Vagrantfile Modifications

1. Update path to ssh file for override.ssh.private_key_path. This ssh file can be found by asking the droplet maintainer.
2. Add in token to provider.token for ruhacks-droplet machine. This can be found by asking the droplet maintainer or resetting the ruhacks token on DigitalOcean.

Deploying

Before deploying make sure your changes work on the dev environment!

When deploying to droplet make sure to have all the files the server has under its /vagrant directory. Then to update the server with your changes run vagrant rsync ruhacks-droplet.

Currently rsyncing is not the best method if you only want to push your changes without having to setup and update the other applications

If the need arises we'll look into setting up FTP/SFTP or some other method on production server to push changes.

Issues

Submit an issue if anything does not behave as expected.

NOTES

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-use-postgresql-on-ubuntu-16-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-redis-on-ubuntu-16-04 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11192134/connect-to-a-db-using-psycopg2-without-password scp -r -i /c/.ssh/di_rsa admin/bower_components root@ruhacks.com:/vagrant/admin