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Laravan

Ansible Playbooks for Laravel - machine provisioning and app deployment

Laravan is capable of preparing a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04 machine for running laravel apps and docker containers by setting up the following components using Ansible:

  • Nginx
  • PHP 7.2, 7.3 & 7.4
  • MariaDB 10
  • PostgreSQL 11
  • Beanstalkd
  • Redis

It also brings some neat, optional stuff:

  • Run services in docker containers and expose them via https through a reverse proxy
  • Single-command deployment of Laravel applications with rollback capability
  • Automatic database backups
  • Free TLS certificates via letsencrypt
  • Supervisor for reliably running queue workers
  • Hosting of static pages and Single Page Applications

This makes Laravan a viable alternative to paid tools like Forge or Envoyer. It can also be used to implement Continuous Integration/Deployment by running the playbooks from your CI server.

Table of Contents

Getting Started

1. Install Ansible

Ansible needs to be installed on your local machine from which you're going to provision your servers and deploy your Laravel apps. Install instructions: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/intro_installation.html

2. Prepare Server

Boot up a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 machine. Set up ssh keys for the root user and make sure you can log in from your local machine.

The target machine needs to have python (v2) installed in order to be provisioned by Ansible.

Vagrant (optional)

A Vagrantfile is provided with laravan, so you can fire up a fresh local vm by just stating vagrant up from your laravan directory. You will still need to set up your ssh keys for the root user of the Vagrant box.

3. Install Laravan

On your local machine, run the following commands to prepare Laravan:

git clone https://github.com/jsphpl/laravan
cd laravan
./setup.sh

4. Link Machines

  1. Enter the IP addresses of your hosts to the hosts file, each under their respective environment. If you created a vagrant machine using vagrant up from the laravan directory, its IP address will be 10.10.0.42.

5. Configure Applications

Open up group_vars/{env}/apps.yml and provide the necessary information for your Laravel apps. There is an example under group_vars/production/apps.yml to get you started.

Note: in apps.yml, you will need to specify some "sensitive" variables that should not be entered into your VCS in plain text, eg. env.APP_KEY. In the example, the values reference variables in the vault, eg. {{ vault.app_key }}. These variables need to be assigned concrete values in the group_vars/{env}/vault.yml. Please refer to section 7. "Encrypt vault" for instructions on how to encrypt your vault files.

  • myapp (key of the dictionary items) must be replaced with a unique name for the app
  • canonical: holds the primary domain name under which your app will be available
  • env: those values will eventually be written into an .env file on the server

6. Configure Databases

Open up group_vars/{env}/databases.yml and configure the databases required for your apps. There is an example under group_vars/production/databases.yml to get you started.

7. Encrypt vault

In order to prevent your production secrets from ending up as plain text in your git repositories, use the ansible vault.

  1. Create a .vault_pass file containing a strong password in the project root (eg. openssl rand -base64 64 > .vault_pass). This file is gitignored, which you should leave at all cost. Your coworkers who need to be able to provision/deploy as well, will need a copy of the file. Send it to them by other (encrypted) means, but don't add it to your VCS!
  2. Encrypt your vault: ansible-vault encrypt group_vars/production/vault.yml
  3. Never again decrypt the vault!. Use ansible-vault view <path> or ansible-vault edit <path> to open the vault file. This reduces the risk of the vault ending up plain text in your version control.

8. Set ssh keys for web user

In group_vars/all/users.yml, make sure to add a valid ssh public key for the web user. Either use the lookup() syntax to read a local file, or specify a http(s) url for remotely hosted public keys (eg. on github).

9. Provision

Note: When using "letsencrypt" as TLS certificate provider, all domains listed under canonical or redirects must be mapped to your IP address (resolvable via public DNS) before you can successfully provision your server.

On your local machine, run the following command, replacing production with the environment you want to provision (most likely development, staging or production).

ansible-playbook provision.yml -e env=production

10. Deploy

Again, on the local machine, run the following command to fetch your app from the git repository, install composer dependencies and run the migrations. The app=myapp variable refers to a key in the group_vars/{env}/apps.yml dictionary.

ansible-playbook deploy.yml -e env=production -e app=myapp

Note: Replace myapp with the key that your app is listed under in the apps object in group_vars/{env}/apps.yml. Replace production with the environment you want to deploy to

In case deployment fails with an error message indicating a lack of access right to the git repository, make sure that a local ssh key is authorized with the git remote of the app. There could also be a problem with with ssh agent-forwarding, which you can troubleshoot using this guide: https://developer.github.com/v3/guides/using-ssh-agent-forwarding/.

Using laravan in your CI/CD pipeline

In order to use laravan in your CI/CD pipeline, you have to:

  1. Give your CI server access to your laravan repository (with all its configuration in it)
  2. Make the .vault_pass available to your CI server
  3. Run the deploy.yml playbook in your pipeline in order to deploy the application

Using laravan with Gitlab Pipelines

Take a look at .gitlab-ci.yml.example for an example configuration for Gitlab Pipelines. Make sure to replace all YOUR_xyz_GOES_HERE strings with your actual values.

In order to make it work, configure the following environment variables in gitlab for the project you're deploying:

  • STAGING_DEPLOY_KEY: an ssh private key that authorizes the web user on your staging system
  • PRODUCTION_DEPLOY_KEY: an ssh private key that authorizes the web user on your production system
  • VAULT_PASS: The vault password to decrypt the ansible vault

Besides that, make sure:

  • the respective "DEPLOY_KEYs" are allowed read access on your application repository and the laravan repository (set them up as deploy keys in the respective Gitlab project)
  • in your apps.yml configuration under source, set version: "{{ lookup('env', 'VERSION') }}" in order to deploy the git revision for which the pipeline is running. Otherwise it would default to master and possibly deploy the wrong version.

Credits

Credits to the awesome Trellis project, which heavily inspired me to create Laravan and from which i copied some code and concepts.

License

This software is released "as it is" without any warranty under the MIT licence. See LICENSE for details.