This guide provides a quick and dirty way to configure the system we use to run the SSR service for beta.

Prerequisites

This procedure uses ansible to manipulate remote servers via SSH - essentially automating what you'd otherwise do "by hand" in a step-by-step approach.

To perform this manual deployment setup, you need to be in possession of a machine or instance to deploy to, and an SSH private key for which there is an associated user that is authorized to perform the operations. To create such an instance, you may utilize one of WMDE's Wikimedia CloudVPS projects, please consult your Engineering Manager or Tech Lead for more information.

Preparation

1. Copy servers.ini.example to servers.ini

   $ cp servers.ini.example servers.ini
   

2. In servers.ini change <ssr-server-url> to the ssh address of the instance you intend to deploy the SSR service for beta into.

Run (from your local machine)

$ ansible-playbook -b -i servers.ini ssr.yml

Development

Linting

Playbooks can be checked for notorious problems and oversights using the handy ansible-lint command - it helps us write concise, consistent configuration.

ansible-lint ssr.yml

Troubleshooting

To ease troubleshooting, we can examine logs with journalctl in the instance where the services are deployed to.

Tip: add the flag -f to the commands below to view the logs as a stream

termbox-updater.service logs

sudo journalctl -n 25 -u termbox-updater.service

termbox.service logs

sudo journalctl -n 25 -u termbox.service