Subspace

Subspace is a rubygem meant to make provisioning as easy as Capistrano makes deploying.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SubspaceAnsible

It is powered by Ansible. Most of the roles require you to configure variables that the role uses.

Installation

First, install ansible (>2.0)

OSX:

brew install ansible

Linux:

apt-get install ansible

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'subspace'

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install subspace

Usage

`subspace init`

Initialize the project for subspace. Creates config/provision with all necessary files.

`subspace bootstrap <environment>`

Ensures the $HOME/.ssh directory is present and ensures python is installed. Python is required to be installed on the remote server for the provision command to work.

`subspace provision <environment>`

Runs the playbook at config/provision/<environment.yml>.

You can pass certain options through to the ansible-playbook command. See the provision command for the current list.

At the time of this writing, we pass through the ansible-playbook "tags" and "start-at-task" options. The tags option is probably the most useful.

e.g. To run only the alienvault tasks (all of which have been tagged with the 'alienvault' tag): subspace provision dev --tags=alienvault

`subspace maintain <environment>`

Runs the playbook at config/provision/<environment.yml> but only the tasks tagged with "maintenance".

You can pass certain options through to the ansible-playbook command. See the maintain command for the current list.

At the time of this writing, we pass through the ansible-playbook "limit" option.

e.g. To run only on the host "prod-web1": subspace maintain production --limit=prod-web1

`subspace maintenance_mode <environment> --on`

This sets up nginx to return all requests as 503 and serve only the static page at /u/apps/{{project_name}}/current/public/maintenance.html which must be checked into your project and deployed to the server.

--on and --off, defaults to off.

Only works for hosts using the nginx role, but you can pass in your entire environment. Running it on worker servers won't hurt anything.

MUST be turned off manually by running subspace maintenance_mode <environment> --off, even a deploy will not disable maintenance mode.

Tagged roles

Role	Tags	Comment
alienvault	alienvault	All tasks in the alienvault role have been tagged 'alienvault'
common	upgrade	runs apt-get update and apt-get upgrade
common	authorized_keys	updates the authorized_keys file for the deploy user
rails	appyml
monit	monit	All tasks in the monit role have been tagged 'monit'

`subspace vars <environment> [--edit] [--create]`

Manage environment variables on different platforms. The default action is simply to show the vars defined for an environment. Pass --edit to edit them in the system editor.

The new system uses a file in config/provision/templates/application.yml.template that contains environment variables for all environments. The configuration that is not secret is visible and version controlled, while the secrets are stored in the vault files for their environments. The default file created by subspace init looks like this:

# These environment variables are applied to all environments, and can be secret or not

# This is secret and can be changed on all three environment easily by using subspace vars <env> --edit
SECRET_KEY_BASE: {{secret_key_base}}

#This is not secret, and is the same value for all environments
ENABLE_SOME_FEATURE: false

development:
  INSECURE_VARIABLE: "this isn't secret"

dev:
  INSECURE_VARIABLE: "but it changes"

production:
  INSECURE_VARIABLE: "on different servers"

Further, you can use the extremely command to create a local copy of config/application.yml

# Create a local copy of config/application.yml with the secrets encrypted in vars/development.yml
$ subspace vars development --create

This can get you up and running in development securely, the only thing you need to distribute to new team members is the vault password. Grab it from a teammate and put it into config/provision/.vault_pass

NOTE: application.yml should be in the .gitignore, since subspace creates a new version on the server and symlinks it on top of whatever is checked in.

Procedure for updating on projects

When subspace is updated, you should also update it for projects that use it. If subspace is locked to a specific version in the a project's gemfile, you'll need to update that to the new release number, first. Make sure this won't introduce any breaking changes by looking at the changelog.

bundle update subspace

Then,

subspace provision production

If you get an error saying you need a vault password file, you should be able to find it in 1Password. You might also need to update ansible.

You'll want to do this for each environment (ie: subspace provision qa, etc.). Best to start with dev and work your way up.

Host configuration

We need to know some info about hosts, but not much. See the files for details, it's mostly the hostname and the user that can administer the system, eg ubuntu on AWS/ubuntu, ec2-user, or even root (not recommended)

Role Configuration

This is a description of all the roles that are included by installing subspace, along with their configuration.

common

This role should almost always be there. It ties a bunch of stuff together, runs apt-get update or yum upgrade, sets hostnames, and generally makes the server sane.

project_name: my_project
swap_space: 512M
deploy_user: deploy

Note: we grant the deploy user limited sudo access to run service xyz restart and also add it to the adm group so it can view logs in /var/log.

Roles

This is a description of all the roles that are included by installing subspace, along with their configuration.

alienvault

Fixes CVEs on remote servers by installing updated versions of packages depending on the operating system version.

Each CVE fix is tagged by the CVE name so updates can be targeted to a specific vulnerability.

Variables: None

apache

The most important file for an apache install is the "project.conf" file that gets created in sites-available and symlinked to sites-enabled. This is generated in a sensible way, but if you want to customize it you can do so by setting this variable to anything other than "project.conf":

apache_project_conf: my_custom_configuration.conf

Then place my_custom_configuration.conf in config/provision/templates/my_custom_configuration.conf. This will still get copied to the server as sites-available/{project_name}.conf

Apache also support canonicalizing the domain now, so if you alwyas want to redirect to WWW for example, simply add a variable:

canonical_domain: "www.example.com"

collectd

Collectd is a super useful daemon that grabs and reports statistics about a server's health. Adding this role will make your server start reporting to a graphite server that you specify, and you can make cool graphs and data feeds after that using something like Grafana

graphite_host: graphite.example.com
graphite_port: "2003"

Aside from basic statistics like free memory, disk, load averages, etc, we have some custom things:

If Postgres and delayed job are installed, it will collect stats on number of outstanding delayed jobs. a. If you have pg on a different server or in RDS, you can set this manually:

collectd_pgdj: true
If apache is installed, it will collect stats from the /server-status page
If nginx is installed, it will collect stats from the "status port"
(TODO) add something for pumas
(TODO) add something for sidekiq
(TODO) add something for memcache
If you're using our standard lograge format, you can enable lograge collection which will provide stats on request count and timers (db/view/total)

rails_lograge: true

common

delayed_job

Install monitoring and automatic startup for delayed job workers via monit. You MUST set the job_queues variable as follows:

job_queues:
  - default
  - mailers
  - exports

If you want to have multiple workers for a single queue, just add the queue name multiple times:

job_queues:
  - default
  - mailers
  - exports
  - exports
  - exports

Please note that by default, delayed job does not set a queue (eg it uses the "null" queue). You MUST also add an initializer to your rails app where you set the default queue name to "default" (or some other queue). Otherwise, the named queue workers managed by this role will not process the "null" queue.

# config/initializers/delayed_job.rb
Delayed::Worker.default_queue_name = 'default'

Defaults:

delayed_job_command: bin/delayed_job

letsencrypt

By default, this creates a single certificate for every server alias/server name in the configuration file. If you'd like more control over the certs created, you can define the variables le_ssl_certs as follows:

le_ssl_certs:
  - cert_name: mycert
    domains:
      - mydomain.example.com
      - otherdomain.example.com
  - cert_name: othersite
    domains:
      - othersite.example.com

Note that this role needs to be included before the webserver (apache or nginx) role

logrotate

Installs logrotate and lets you configure logs for automatic rotation. Example config for rails:

logrotate_scripts:
  - name: rails
    path: "/u/apps/{{project_name}}/shared/log/{{rails_env}}.log"
    options:
      - weekly
      - size 100M
      - missingok
      - compress
      - delaycompress
      - copytruncate

memcache

monit

mysql

mysql2_gem

newrelic

nginx-rails

Configures nginx to look at localhost:9292 for the socket/backend connection. If you need to do fancy stuff you should simply override this role

subspace override nginx-rails

defaults are here, we'll probably add more:

client_max_body_size: 4G
ssl_force_redirect: true
default_server: true
keepalive_timeout: 10
extra_nginx_config: ""

Optional variables:

asset_cors_allow_origin: Set this to set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin for
everything in /assets.

nginx_proxy_read_timeout: Set [proxy_read_timeout](https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_read_timeout). This is in seconds. You probably only want to change this if using rack-timeout (although I may be wrong). If using rack-timeout, it should be slightly higher than the rack-timeout timeout. I'm doing 5 seconds higher, but that was arbitrarily chosen.

ssl_force_redirect: redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS on the same host.  Defaults to true and only applies if ssl_enabled is also true.
extra_nginx_config: anything else you want to configure in the main nginx config block, formatted like:
extra_nginx_config: |
  proxy_http_version 1.1;
  chunked_transfer_encoding off;
  proxy_buffering off;
  proxy_cache off;

nodejs

Used to install recent version of NodeJS. Must set nodejs_version. e.g. nodejs_version: "8.x"

papertrail

passenger

postgresql

Sets up a postgres server - only use this on the database machine.

backups_enabled: true
s3_db_backup_bucket: disabled
s3_db_backup_prefix: "{{project_name}}/{{rails_env}}"
database_user: "{{project_name}}"

puma

add puma gem to gemfile add config/puma to symlinks in deploy.rb

rails

Provisions for a rails app. This one is probably pretty important.

Default values (these are usually fine)

database_pool: 5
database_name: "{{project_name}}_{{rails_env}}"
database_user: "{{project_name}}"
job_queues:
  - default
  - mailers

Customize:

rails_env: [whatever]

redis

Installs redis on the server.

# Change to * if you want tthis available everywhere.
redis_bind: 127.0.0.1

ruby-common

Installs ruby on the machine. YOu can set a version by picking off the download url and sha hash from ruby-lang.org

ruby_version: ruby-2.4.1
ruby_checksum: a330e10d5cb5e53b3a0078326c5731888bb55e32c4abfeb27d9e7f8e5d000250
ruby_download_location: 'https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/2.4/ruby-2.4.1.tar.gz'
bundler_version: 2.0.1

sidekiq

This will install a monit script that keeps sidekiq running. We spawn one sidekiq instance that manages as many queues as you need. Varaibles of note:

job_queues:
  - default
  - mailers

Note that as of v0.4.13, we now also add a unique job queue for each host with its hostname. This is handy if you need to assign a job to a specific host. In general you should use named queues, but occasionally this is useful and there's no harm in having it there unused.

Sidekiq uses redis by default, and rails connects to a redis running on localhost by default. However, this role does not depend on redis since in production it's likely redis will be running elsewhere. If you're provisioning a standalone server, make sure to include the redis role.

Other Internal Roles

Since ansible doesn't support versioning of roles, we cloned the role here so that it doesn't change unexpectedly. We expect to update from upstream occasionally, please let us know if we're missing something we should have.

You should not include these roles directly in your subspace config files. For example, instead of including zenoamaro.postgresql, simply include our postgresql role which depens on zenoamaro's role.

Thanks to the following repositories for making their roles available:

Development

Directory Structure

ansible/roles

Contains all of our custom roles. When the gem is installed and subspace init is ran, the newly created ansible.cfg will be configured to look for these roles.

template

Contains the template files that get copied over when subspace init is ran.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version:

update the version number in version.rb
update the version number in motds
run bundle exec rake release

This will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/tenforwardconsulting/subspace. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Subspace

Installation

Usage

subspace init

subspace bootstrap <environment>

subspace provision <environment>

subspace maintain <environment>

subspace maintenance_mode <environment> --on

Tagged roles

subspace vars <environment> [--edit] [--create]

Procedure for updating on projects

Host configuration

Role Configuration

common

Roles

alienvault

apache

collectd

common

delayed_job

letsencrypt

logrotate

memcache

monit

mysql

mysql2_gem

newrelic

nginx-rails

nodejs

papertrail

passenger

postgresql

puma

rails

redis

ruby-common

sidekiq

Other Internal Roles

Development

Directory Structure

Development

Contributing

License

Roles and Variables

`subspace init`

`subspace bootstrap <environment>`

`subspace provision <environment>`

`subspace maintain <environment>`

`subspace maintenance_mode <environment> --on`

`subspace vars <environment> [--edit] [--create]`