An Ansible Playbook for deploying Meteorapps

• Requirement: Ansible > 2.0.0

This Ansible playbook will allow you to deploy Meteor apps of all sizes to your own servers/VMs. It handles setups of varying complexity. From a single small VM that serves your app to a load balanced setup with multiple servers.

• Deploying multiple apps to a single server
• Setup and configure a MongoDB server with authentification and oplog enabled
• Scale vertically by spawning multiple processes of your app. Passenger will handle loadbalancing requests across those processes
• Scale horizontally across multiple servers with HaProxy
• Configure SSL support either for a single node or HaProxy

This playbook covers three types of groups in your inventory:

• appservers
• mongoservers
• loadbalancers

For a minimal setup (with hosted MongoDB servers with a service like compose) you only need to provide a single IP in the appservers section

SSH Agent forwarding: This playbook instructs ansible to forward your ssh agent, which means that git and mrt will have access to the same repositories that your ssh key has. Note: you need to run ssh-add -k on OSX once per sessions to add your keys to the ssh agent

To run tests run run_tests.sh Three Tests are included and also serve as examples:

• single_node: Launch a MongoDB server and a appserver with an instance of Telescope
• two_node_multisite: Launch a dedicated MongoDB server, and configure passenger on one to serve both Spacetalk (with SSL) and Telescope from the same server Note: you can use the same pattern to seperate your staging and production environment
• load_balanced_spacetalk: Launch and configure: A MongoDB server, two appservers (with two instances per server) and a loadbalancer for Spacetalk

all.yml these are the users that will be created in case you choose your own mongodb server

• mongodb_root_user:
  • the root user, which will be created to enable the creation of the other users
  • username
  • password
• mongodb_meteor_user
  • the user and database which will have access to the database that will be used by meteor
  • username
  • password
  • database
• mongodb_oplog_user
  • username
  • password
• app_bundle_dir: path to where app will be bundled
• app_git_checkout: branch, tag or commit to build
• app_git_repo: ssh path to repo
• app_mobile_server: meteor mobile server param
• app_root_dir: path where git repo will be cloned to
• git_deploy_private_key: git key to use to checkout repo
• meteor_env:
  • HTTP_FORWARDED_COUNT: 1
  • MAIL_URL: ""
  • MONGO_OPLOG_URL: ""
  • MONGO_URL: ""
  • ROOT_URL: ""
  • AUTOUPDATE_VERSION: optional
  • OTHER_ENV_VAR: ""
• meteor_settings_file: path to settings relative to app_root_dir
• nginx_config_file_name: name of the created nginx config file
• nginx_enable_ssl: true
• nginx_server_name: "example.com"
• nginx_force_ssl: false
• nginx_ssl_cert_file_name
• nginx_ssl_key_file_name
• passenger_friendly_error_pages: "off"
• passenger_group: www
• passenger_user: www
• passenger_min_instances: number of app instances on one machine
• passenger_port: 80
• passenger_pre_start: "yes"
• ssl_certificate: if you want to enable ssl eithe on the loadbalancer or on the appserver level, you need to paste your certificates here, use pipe ( | ) for multiline strings (http://stackoverflow.com/a/21699210/404799)
• ssl_key
• app_git_relative_dir: path to app if it resides in a subdirectory of a git repo

Loadbalancer:

• haproxy_config_use_appservers_eth: eth0
• haproxy_enable_ssl: true
• haproxy_enable_stats: true
• haproxy_force_ssl: false
• haproxy_stats_password
• haproxy_stats_port
• haproxy_stats_username
• haproxy_ws_healthcheck_domain: example.com

Appservers: see roles/meteorapp/README.md

All variables can be combined into all.yml for simpler deployment

Tips: This article is very good: http://hakunin.com/six-ansible-practices

Todo:

• client_max_body_size

Notes: ssh agent forwarding is slow when cloning a repo, disable and use git key for faster deploy