Prepare the Ansible Environment

Prepare the Ansible Environment#

Section Roles Description and Installation reviews all the roles that make up Carbonio and the tasks required to successfully complete the installation.

To make the installation process easier and faster, this section introduces an alternative installation method based on Ansible Galaxy, an Ansible playbook, and an Ansible inventory file .

Note

Ansible is free software that allows you to automate the configuration and management procedures on Unix-like and Windows systems.

Ansible will read an inventory file containing a list of the Nodes on which to install the various Roles and automatically execute on the proper Node all the necessary tasks.

Once the Control Node (see Section Ansible Setup below) has been properly set up according the directions in the remainder, the ansible installation only requires to edit the inventory file and run one CLI command to execute the playbook.

Requirements#

You can run the Ansible playbook form any workstation, which runs Linux, macOS, or BSD, satisfying the following requirements

Note

Using Ansible from a Windows workstation is not straightforward: If you want to use the Ansible playbook from a Windows workstation, please read the official Windows FAQ for setting it up.

Workstation requirements

  1. The workstation has a working installation of Ansible (see Section Ansible Setup for directions)

  2. The workstation has SSH access as the root user to all the Nodes on which Carbonio must be installed. This is necessary because Ansible needs to install packages and carry out various tasks which require root privileges.

    Hint

    You can temporarily copy the SSH key of the user on the workstation to the .ssh/authorized_keys file of the Nodes’ root user

Nodes requirements

Besides the Requirements that every Node must satisfy, each Nodes must

  1. be equipped with the same supported OS (see section Software Requirements)

  2. be able to reach one another via SSH

  3. have the Carbonio repository configured (see section Preliminary Tasks for directions)

Ansible Setup#

This section guides you in the set up of a workstation featuring Ansible (the Control Node) and the Carbonio Ansible playbook, with the purpose to install Carbonio on an existing infrastructure.

The control node should run on any Linux, macOS, or BSD box. Windows is supported but needs some work, therefore it is not mentioned here.

Install Ansible - Linux#

On Linux, Ansible can be installed using packages in the distribution’s repository, hence using the distribution’s package manager. Please refer to the official installation guide. This procedure pulls all the necessary dependencies, including python3.

If you prefer alternative installation methods, like using manual python package installation, containers, or from source code, please refer to the Installing Ansible section of the official documentation, which includes also installation requirements.

To verify that installation was successful, run the following command on the control node

$ ansible --version

Install Ansible - macOS, BSD#

The best installation option on these platforms is to use homebrew, provided a python3 interpreter is installed on the system. You can follow these directions.

Install Carbonio Playbook#

Carbonio Playbook is available from Ansible Galaxy in two variants: one for Single-Server Scenario and one for all other scenarios. You need to simply run a command to install either of them.

Playbook for Single-Server Scenario
# ansible-galaxy collection install zxbot.carbonio_ssinstall
Playbook for all other Scenarios
# ansible-galaxy collection install zxbot.carbonio_install

Configure Ansible#

You can configure Ansible using the ansible.cfg in the cloned repository (i.e., in directory carbonio-install-ansible). We suggest to define at least a log file, which you can do achieve as follows:

[defaults]
log_path=/var/log/carbonio-ansible.log

Multiple Inventories#

If you plan to install multiple instances of Carbonio on different environments, we suggest that you create a dedicated directory to store the various inventories required for the different setups. We will call this directory /opt/carbonio-installations/. During the installation procedure, we assume that the inventory file is saved in this directory.

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