LAMP on Steroids

LAMP On Steroids contains a set of Ansible roles that help set up a modern RHEL web server. We test it out mainly on the RockyLinux 9 system, but it should also work on CentOS Stream 9 and other RHEL-based systems. The primary purpose is to set up a working and secure web server for PHP/Node.js applications.

Prerequisites

You must have the Ansible installed in your system. If you don't have it, please follow this guide - Installing Ansible.

It is best to use the latest version of Ansible. We tested the roles in this repository on Ansible 8.3.0 (core version 2.15.3). If you are running an older version, we recommend updating to the newer version of Ansible.

How to use?

First create your Inventory file. You can work entirely in this repository. Name your Inventory file hosts (this file is in .gitignore) and setup all required connections there.

Example Inventory file:

[example-host]
192.168.87.87   ansible_ssh_user=vagrant    ansible_ssh_private_key_file="~/.ssh/id_rsa"

Next setup your playbook. The easiest way is to copy playbooks/example-playbook.yml file and comment out the roles you don't need. All .yml files are ignored in playbooks directory.

Optionally you can add variable files that will override defaults in roles. All .yml files in vars directory are in .gitignore

Run following command to execute this playbook:

ansible-playbook -i hosts playbooks/YOUR_PLAYBOOK_FILE.yml

Some tasks are marked with healthcheck tag. They will do some basic checks to see if system is up and running. All tasks should be green. If there are tasks marked as changed, something is not OK.

ansible-playbook -i hosts playbooks/YOUR_PLAYBOOK_FILE.yml --tags="healthcheck" 

Please take a look at vars/example-vars.yml file and make sure that you override default developer account password and path to your public key. Public key is required for logging in via SSH with RSA keys. Logging with password will be turned off. Password is required for sudo, if you will set centos_groups_wheel_password_required to yes (this is default value). Once sudo with password will be available, you must execute playbooks with -K argument and pass sudo password:

ansible-playbook -i hosts playbooks/YOUR_PLAYBOOK_FILE.yml -K

Included roles

dnf - Handle RockyLinux package management, security features, and package installation optimizations.

users - Handle users/groups management and enables sudo.

ssh - SSHD hardening.

ntp - Take care of system timezone and NTP server. It uses Chrony for using NTP.

openssl - Compile OpenSSL from source (3.0.1)

git - Compile and install Git from source (2.42.0)

nginx - Compile, install and configure nginx from source (1.25.2)

php - Compile, install and configure PHP and tools (8.2.9)

firewalld - Setup firewalld as base firewall

mysql - Install and configure MySQL community server (8.0.34). Create databases and users. Install MySQLTuner and set up backups.

awscli - Install and configure AWS CLI command line tool (2.13.12)

redis - Install and configure Redis with TLS support (7.2.0)

nodejs - Install NodeJs and NPM (20.5.1)

centos - Takes care of system settings. Set up firewall based on iptables. Disable Transparent Huge Pages. You can setup logrotate scripts with this role as well.

httpd - Compile and configure Apache httpd from source with OpenSSL (2.4.33)

mongodb - Install and configure MongoDB (7.0.0) with authentication, TLS support, backups and users management.

letsencrypt - Install Certbot and obtain certificates from Let's Encrypt