CKAN Ansible Playbook

This is an ansible playbook for building and minimally deploying CKAN on Ubuntu 14.04 host. This playbook tries as much as possible to follow the recommended way of installing CKAN from source while adhering to Ansible best practices. After successfully running this playbook, there are some additional tasks which must be run manually such as initializing databases, copying site theme, content e.t.c.

By default, this playbook assumes that you're installing CKAN & its dependencies(solr, postgresql, nginx & apache) on one host. And you'll be using apache web server primarily for python WSGI support via nginx web server on the front(reverse proxy) i.e. port 80 as recommended by CKAN docs.

Ansible Roles

This playbook is broken down the following several parts/roles, each doing a minimal & specific tasks:

• apache role: Installs & configures apache2. Apache provides modwsgi which allows us to run python applications with WSGI interface. This role also configures apache2 to listen & serve requests on port 8080 since we'll have nginx on the front( port 80).
• nginx role: Installs & configures nginx web server. Additional configuration parameters for proxying, X-* security headers, gzip compression, caching, e.t.c. are also deployed on the remote server.
• postgresql role: This role installs & configures postgresql-9.3 server. This role doesn't create/manage postgresql users & or databases, that is done in the ckan role.
• solr role: Installs & configures solr-5.2.x. By default, this role creates one solr core—ckan_default—used by CKAN. Though CKAN doesn't insist/recommend using a specific version of solr, I decided to use solr 5.2.1 and it works fine on test environments.
• ckan role: This role builds & installs CKAN from sources using pip. It creates a ckan user who owns all CKAN related files & directories, creates postgresql user & database used by CKAN, configures apache2 vhost for WSGI support & finally creates nginx vhost for proxy passing requests to apache2 WSGI processes.

NOTE
apache, nginx & ckan roles can all be grouped in one group—ckan—and are usually deployed on one host in production & test environments whereas postgresql & solr roles are in separate groups—db & solr respectively—and are usually deployed on separate hosts too.

Usage

• clone this repo:

    $ git clone https://github.com/oguya/ansible-ckan.git
    $ cd ansible-ckan
  

• Add your db, solr and ckan host(s) in the inventory hosts file, for example: ckan01 host belongs to the ckan, db and solr groups - for more info about these groups, see sample host variables files in host_vars directory:

    [ckan]
    ckan01
  
    [db]
    ckan01
  
    [solr]
    ckan01
  

• dry run all the playbooks:

    $ ansible-playbook site.yml --ask-become-pass --check
  

• deploy CKAN & its dependencies(solr, postgresql, nginx & apache) on ckan01 host:

    $ ansible-playbook site.yml --ask-become-pass -i hosts --limit=ckan01
  

• install & configure solr 5.2.x on ckan01 host:

    $ ansible-playbook solr.yml --ask-become-pass -i hosts --limit=ckan01
  

• install & configure postgresql-9.3 on ckan01 host:

    $ ansible-playbook db.yml --ask-become-pass -i hosts --limit=ckan01
  

• deploy CKAN on ckan01 host:

    $ ansible-playbook ckan.yml --ask-become-pass -i hosts --limit=ckan01
  

Assumptions

I took into assumption, a few key items when running this playbook:

• You have a provisioning user account—provisioning—with passwordless SSH access to the target host
• The provisioning user has sudo privileges on the remote host
• You're installing CKAN & its dependencies(solr, postgresql, nginx & apache) on one target host - ckan01

References

A few roles in this playbook e.g. postgresql, solr & nginx have been borrowed from ILRI's rmg-ansible-public repo.

Contribution

Pull requests and Github issues are all welcome!

License

Copyright (C) 2015–2016 James Oguya

The contents of this repository are free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.