blog

I went and ordered two VPSes and a domain name. Apparently that order in and of itself got me flagged to be somehow suspicious by the registrar/hosting provider, so I'm hoping that can be sorted with them. Truth be told, I am impressed that a hobby I just bought into can fail right out of the gates like this. In the meantime, this is me writing up a local .html file and trying to unforget and learn a thing or two about web development. Don't expect too much.

So yea apparently my auto-fill needs some autocorrect on re-filling in my information at the hosting providers' website. Stuff be working now, yo! Woop! I've received the VPS'ses, and the domain name propagation is in progress as we speak. I've installed nginx manually and simply dumped my static files on the machine and, not to brag, but I AM A THING ON THE INTERNET NOW!

todo: lots!

If you can read this I have got Ansible set up to a point where nginx and ssl are provisioned. Also statics are copied by ansible :) The directory structure below is a wall of shame that hopefully has me rethink my ansible setup soon

  ansible % tree
  .
  ├── bootstrap_inventory
  ├── bootstrap.yml
  ├── inventory
  ├── playbooks
  │   ├── nginx-site.yml
  │   ├── nginx.yml
  │   ├── ssl.yml
  │   ├── statics
  │   │   ├── index.html
  │   │   └── style.css
  │   └── statics.yml
  └── web.yml
  

What you're seeing is a bunch of scattered playbooks. Some are for bootstrapping a VPS and creating an ansible user, some are for provisionnig nginx and ssl. Most of the naming is going to get labyrinthy in a while. Also, it would have been suiting to move static files somewhere _outside_ of the ansible playbook provisioning madness. It is, however, late, and this worked.

So obviously the number of things I could be working on here explodes right out of the gate. I'll try and handle that in a way that seems logical to me: Make a list! In true rite of passage style, I've (added site nav and) made a todo page for any ideas of any quality. I hope that posting it publicly like that helps with staying motivated. I intend for it to be a working document for work that still needs done'ing.

I'm not entirely sure how to celebrate success when I can take an item off the list. Should be one of the first items on there: Celebrate "done"!

Disregard the shame of the previous post mentioning my ansible mess. I have improved, honestly! Look!

.
├── ansible
│   ├── ansible.cfg
│   ├── inventory
│   │   └── production.yml
│   └── playbooks
│       ├── bootstrap.yml
│       ├── nginx-site.yml
│       ├── nginx.yml
│       ├── ssl.yml
│       ├── statics.yml
│       └── web.yml
.
.
. other secret stuff
  

Right. So a few things have changed functionally here:

• I've gotten rid of the 'special' bootstrapping inventory and now just have a singular production inventory. the reason for bootstrap existing was that i defined the ansible user there. Ansible needs root access to provision its own user. After that, the entire bootstap inventory becomes disused.
• Finally fixed relative import for deploying web statics. I have separated that from the provisioning logic that is ansible.
• Defined some default command arguments in ansible.cfg.

Deploying an application to a 'bare' web VPS is pretty nifty like this. Given that the machine is reachable and you have ssh set up, bootstrapping ansible is done like: ansible-playbook playbooks/bootstrap.yml -u root. Initialising nginx and ssl configuration would be ansible-playbook -i inventory web.yml -u deploy. And once I'm done writing this blog article I'll dump the html on the server by ansible-playbook -i inventory playbooks/statics.yml -u deploy. Unless I broke stuff. I break stuff..

I think most of the above is pretty useless without the source code to delve into. Even if your interest is piqued. I may get around to sharing that at some point. Until then I consider this blog a mere outlet and a bad way of documenting commands for future use. :D