Ansible

Set up an Ansible environment for deploying Rocket.Chat to multiple servers.

See the Rocket.Chat official Ansible role.

Installation

Ansible works on a "push to clients" basis. Your control node pushes all the configuration/ad-hoc tasks out to your systems via SSH, with no client running on the systems you're deploying to! In order words, it's swift, efficient, secure, scalable, and highly portable. Therefore, to control remote systems, you only need to install Ansible on your control node (your desktop can be an excellent control node to deploy from). Ansible has

To learn more about Ansible installation on different operating systems, see the official installation guide.

Installation via package manager

Ansible is likely available in your official package repositories if you're using a UNIX-like operating system, such as Linux or BSD. Use your package manager to see if it's available and install it.

Installation via PIP

Ansible is written in Python, so it's only natural that it be available for installation via pip. . If you have pip installed, run the following command:

sudo pip install ansible

If you do not have pip, check if you can install pip through your system's package manager (look out for Python 2.7 version). If you're on Mac OS X and you're not using Homebrew or pkgsrc, you should be able to install pip using easy_install with this command:

sudo easy_install pip 
sudo pip install ansible

Simple Deployment Environment for Rocket.Chat

Now that you've installed Ansible, you can deploy Rocket.Chat.

Prerequisites

• You must have SSH access to the system you want to deploy to, as the root user.

• The system you're deploying to must have Python installed and run one of the following operating systems:

  • EL 7 (RHEL/CentOS)

  • Debian 8 (Jessie) LTS

  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

  • Ubuntu 19.04

Future releases of the official Rocket.Chat Ansible role will include other operating systems and Linux distributions/releases. If you'd like to see a particular OS supported, please raise an issue to ask if it can be added.

Inventory set-up

Create a directory anywhere on your system, possibly in your home directory or where you save your code or Git repositories. Give it a name and navigate to that directory.

mkdir ansible
cd ansible
ansible $

Next, create an inventory file in that directory. The inventory file is a simple formatted file containing a list of systems we want to connect to and control using Ansible. It can include single hosts, group hosts together, groups of groups, and set variables on a host or group basis.

We recommend naming the directory ansible and the file inventory to maintain a proper naming convention.

touch inventory

Open the file and add the hostname or FQDN of the server(s) you want to deploy Rocket.Chat to.

chat.my.domain

The [chat_servers] denotes a group called "chat_servers." Any hostnames/FQDNs/IP addresses under this will be members of the "chat_servers" group. If you want to add another server, add it like this:

[chat_servers]
chat.my.domain
talk.my.domain

We recommend authenticating SSH connections to your server(s) using SSH key pairs. However, you can provide Ansible with the root user's password in the inventory file if you don't have SSH.

This should only be temporary because it is an insecure practice.

Set the root user's password for the chat.my.domain host:

[chat_servers]
chat.my.domain ansible_ssh_pass=SuP3rseCre7pA$sw0rd
talk.my.domain

Download the Rocket.Chat Ansible role

Ansible shares and uses other people's roles through Galaxy. You can download the roles you want using a command-line tool installed earlier when you installed Ansible.

 ansible-galaxy.

First, create a roles directory:

ansible $ mkdir roles

Then, create a requirements.yml file describing how we want to fetch the role to ansible-galaxy. Open the file roles/requirements.yml.The file's contents will vary based on which version of Ansible you're running.

Run ansible --version to know your version of Ansible.

If you're running Ansible 1.9.4, update requirements.yml with the following data:

- src: RocketChat.Server
  version: master

If you're running Ansible 2.0, update requirements.yml with the following data:

  - src: RocketChat.Server
    version: v2.2.2

Next, fetch the Rocket.Chat Ansible role using the ansible-galaxy command:

ansible-galaxy install -p roles/ -r roles/requirements.yml

This command installs any roles defined requirements.yml. Now you have the RocketChat.Server role in your roles directory.

ls roles
RocketChat.Server

Create a Playbook to "play" the Rocket.Chat Ansible Role

Ansible roles are built from a collection of "plays" - essentially, tasks/actions to take. To use a role, create a simple playbook that tells Ansible, "I want to run this role on these systems."

Let's call the playbook rocket_chat.yml .

The .yml denotes a YAML document, which is what language you use to express most things in Ansible.

touch rocket_chat.yml

Add the following information to your rocket_chat.yml playbook:

---

  - name: Apply the RocketChat.Server role to all chat_servers
    hosts: chat_servers

    roles:
      - RocketChat.Server

Deploy Rocket.Chat using Ansible

To run the playbook, use the ansible-playbook command,

ansible-playbook -i inventory rocket_chat.yml

This command can be expressed as "run the rocket_chat.yml playbook with the inventory file inventory." When the deployment is successful, visit https://chat.my.domain and the Rocket.Chat login screen appears.

See the README to explore other Ansible role options.