ansible-role-candlepin

An Ansible role that installs and deploys Candlepin for development or testing purposes.

This role is intended for use with newer Candlepin branches, but the resultant environment may still be used with older builds with some minor tweaks or configuration changes within the environment after provisioning.

Requirements

Candlepin has many requirements for its developers. You will need a Fedora or CentOS box, or RHEL with EPEL enabled to use this role. It is recommmended that that box has a non-root user to run Candlepin on (see variables below).

Dependencies

This role depends on the rvm1.ruby role for installing and configuring RVM. At the time of writing, Candlpin has a strict requirement on Ruby 2.4, which is installed and managed via RVM.

The dependency can be avoided by setting cp_configure_ruby, see the following section.

Role Variables

There are a number of variables which enable various features and aspects of a developer environment. The primary flow control variables are the six boolean variables listed below:

• cp_configure_postgresql: controls whether or not PostgreSQL will be installed and configured; defaults to true
• cp_configure_mariadb: controls whether or not MariaDB will be installed and configured; defaults to true
• cp_configure_user_env: controls whether or not some convenience features for the user environment will be setup, such as bash prompts, colors, copying in SSH keys, etc.; defaults to false
• cp_configure_debugging: controls whether or not Tomcat will be configured for remote debugging and profiling via YourKit; defaults to false
• cp_configure_ruby: controls whether or not setup Ruby; defaults to true
• cp_git_checkout: whether or not the Candlepin repo will be cloned via git; defaults to true
• cp_deploy: whether or not Candlepin will be deployed after provisionining the system; defaults to true

For some of these tasks, some operations may be modified or configured by changing further variables. A full list of variables which are intended to be modified on a per-environment basis can be found in the defaults/main.yml file.

User Configuration

By default, Candlepin will be cloned and deployed from the devel directory in the candlepin user's home directory, but this can be modified by changing the three Candlepin home or user variables listed below:

• candlepin_user: the user to install, build, and run as; defaults to "candlepin"
• candlepin_user_home: the home directory of the selected user; defaults to "/home/{{candlepin_user}}"
• candlepin_home: the home directory for the Candlepin checkout or mapping; defaults to "{{ candlepin_user_home }}/devel/candlepin"

In many cases, this can be left as-is. However, in the case of a Vagrant deployment, it is likely these will need to be changed accordingly. For example, in a typical Vagrant setup where the Candlepin repo is mapped in from the host, these variables might be configured as follows:

  ansible_user: vagrant
  candlepin_user: vagrant
  candlepin_home: /vagrant

Git Configuration

This role can clone Candlepin directly from git rather than having to map or copy it onto the host. Three variables control whether or not this action is performed, and what repo and tag is cloned.

• cp_git_checkout: whether or not to perform a git checkout at all; defaults to true
• cp_git_repo: a URI to the repo to check out, may use any repo reference supported by the git command; defaults to "https://github.com/candlepin/candlepin"
• cp_git_ref: a git ref tag indicating the branch, tag, or reference to checkout; defaults to "main"

Deploying Candlpin

By default, this role will deploy Candlepin if the repo exists in the configured location. The deployment can be configured by passing args accepted by Candlepin's deployment tool. See the documentation associated with that tool for details on its parameters.

• cp_deploy: whether or not to deploy Candlepin as part of the provisioning step; defaults to true
• cp_deploy_args: the arguments to pass to the Candlepin deploy tool; defaults to "-gta"

By default, Candlepin will be deployed in a way that drops and re-creates its database from scratch, imports synthetic test data, and then regenerates the candlepin.conf with default settings for PostgreSQL support. To change this to use MySQL/MariaDB instead, add the -m argument to the variable:

  cp_deploy_args: '-gtam'

YourKit Configuration

If the cp_configure_debugging variable is set, this role will configure Tomcat for both remote debugging support, and, optionally, YourKit profiling support. To setup YourKit with this role, a Linux-compatible agent library must be present on the host at the location specified in the cp_yourkit_library variable. If this value is not provided, or the library is not present at that location, the YourKit tasks will be skipped.

• cp_yourkit_library: the path to the YourKit Java profiling agent on the host system; defaults to "/opt/yjp/bin/linux-x86-64/libyjpagent.so"
• cp_yourkit_agent_port: the port on which the agent should listen for profiling clients; defaults to 35675

Vagrant Integration

This role can be used with Vagrant to quickly spin up a VM with a fully prepared development environment. In such cases, it is heavily advised to set the candlepin_user variable accordingly, at minimum.

An example playbook for Vagrant use is as follows:

---
- hosts: all

  roles:
    - role: candlepin

  vars:
    ansible_user: vagrant
    candlepin_user: vagrant
    candlepin_home: /vagrant

    cp_configure_postgresql: true
    cp_configure_mariadb: true
    cp_configure_user_env: true
    cp_configure_debugging: true

    cp_git_checkout: false
    cp_deploy: false

The above playbook would provision the VM with PostgreSQL and MariaDB support, configure the user environment, and configure Tomcat for remote debugging and profiling. It would not check out the Candlepin repo, and, obviously, would not deploy it.

Unit Testing & Molecule

The unit tests will run on github actions; to run the unit tests locally you will need ansible, molecule and its drivers.

To install molecule run the following. Replace podman with docker if that is your container manager:

pip3 install molecule molecule[podman] molecule-containers

You might also want ansible-lint with pip3 install ansible-lint or yum install python3-ansible-lint. To run unit tests simply run molecule test. By default this will test on fedora35, or you can export MOLECULE_DISTRO='centos8' (or centos7) to change the test target.

License

GPLv2

Author Information

See official documentation.