Ansible
Set up an Ansible environment for deploying Rocket.Chat to multiple servers.
Last updated
Set up an Ansible environment for deploying Rocket.Chat to multiple servers.
Last updated
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
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.
Ansible is written in Python, so it's only natural that it be available for installation via . . 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 or , you should be able to install pip using easy_install with this command:
Now that you've installed Ansible, you can deploy Rocket.Chat.
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
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.
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.
Open the file and add the hostname or FQDN of the server(s) you want to deploy Rocket.Chat to.
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:
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:
First, create a roles directory:
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.
If you're running Ansible 1.9.4, update requirements.yml with the following data:
If you're running Ansible 2.0, update requirements.yml with the following data:
Next, fetch the Rocket.Chat Ansible role using the ansible-galaxy command:
This command installs any roles defined requirements.yml. Now you have the RocketChat.Server role in your roles directory.
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 .
Add the following information to your rocket_chat.yml playbook:
To run the playbook, use the ansible-playbook command,
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.
Future releases of the will include other operating systems and Linux distributions/releases. If you'd like to see a particular OS supported, please to ask if it can be added.
Ansible shares and uses other people's roles through . You can download the roles you want using a command-line tool installed earlier when you installed Ansible.
See the to explore other Ansible role options.