Ansible playbook for teiserver

This is an Ansible playbook for setting up Teiserver instance for BAR.

This readme contains the basic information about playbook. There is more documentation available for different aspects in the docs directory.

Usage

If you are trying to set up and test things locally and you don't have access to BAR production instance, first see the Local testing section. If you have access to the server set up with this playbook and you want to figure out how to use it, see the Server usage section.

Playbook

Vault

When running against the prod instances, secrets are stored in files encrypted with ansible-vault, for example group_vars/prod/vault.yml. Check out the official guide for how to view and edit them.

For running the playbook against the prod instances, you will need the vault password. You have to run Ansible with --ask-vault-pass flag and provide the password when prompted or you can store it in a file (Please put it only in something like tmpfs!) and point Ansible at it with --vault-password-file flag or ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE environment variable.

Running

Currently there is only one playbook that sets up the whole server. You can run it against the main instance to check if everything is up to date with:

ansible-playbook -l main play.yml --check --diff

Then drop the --check flag to actually apply the changes.

Tags

It's possible to run only selected part of the playbook with the usage of tags. You can fetch the list of tags with:

ansible-playbook play.yml --list-tags

and then run only selected part with:

ansible-playbook -l main play.yml --tags database,teiserver

Server usage

The playbook will setup the server with:

• deploy user for building and deploying the Teiserver from the main branch
• /home/deploy/prod-data for out-of-source production configs and data like prod.secret.exs managed fully by the playbook
• /home/deploy/teiserver-repo checkout of the Teiserver repository
• teiserver systemd service for running the Teiserver
• A set of tei-* scripts for managing the deployments.

The users should connect to the server via their own individual user, and run commands from them.

The teiserver releases are stored in /opt/teiserver, with the current live one being pointed by the /opt/teiserver/live symlink. Deploying new code involves effectively:

• Building a new Teiserver Elixir release.
• Placing it as a new directory in /opt/teiserver.
• Updating the /opt/teiserver/live symlink to point to the new release directory.
• Restarting the teiserver systemd service.

The tei-* scripts are there to help with that process, so in practice, deploying a new version of Teiserver is as simple as:

# Pull the latest code to the /home/deploy/teiserver-repo/
tei-repo-pull
# Build the new release into opt
tei-rel-build
# Deploy the new release
tei-rel-deploy

ALl scripts start with tei- so you can type tei-[TAB][TAB] to see the list of available commands in bash. All of them also support --help flag to show the usage.

User local code checkout

For the usage on the integration server, each individual user can create their own local checkouts of the Teiserver and deploy them. They don't have to, and really shouldn't at all touch the repo in the /home/deploy/teiserver-repo/ with any local changes.

The example session for on the users could look like:

# Clone the teiserver repo
marek@teiserver-test:~$ git clone https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/teiserver.git
marek@teiserver-test:~$ cd teiserver
# Apply the production config to the local checkout
marek@teiserver-test:~/teiserver$ tei-repo-apply-prod-data .
# Do whatever code changes needed
# (...)
# Build the local checkout into new release
marek@teiserver-test:~/teiserver$ tei-rel-build --repo .
# Deploy the new release
marek@teiserver-test:~/teiserver$ tei-rel-deploy

Local testing

Setup

We use LXD for local testing. Make sure you have it installed and initialized following the docs. For example for Debian, it's as simple as sudo apt install lxd && sudo lxd init.

To create a new container and initialize it via cloud-init, run the following command:

sudo lxc launch images:debian/bookworm/cloud teiserver-test < test.lxc.yml && sudo lxc exec teiserver-test -- cloud-init status --wait

Then test that it works for ansible:

ansible dev -m shell -a 'uname -a'

Usage

Now you can use all the playbooks and roles as usual, just make sure you are targeting the dev inventory group or test host. For example:

ansible-playbook -l dev play.yml

To enter into container shell, run the following command:

sudo lxc exec teiserver-test -- /bin/bash

You can also ssh into it with something like:

ssh -i test.ssh.key ansible@$(ansible-inventory --host test | jq -r '.ansible_host')

Cleanup

To stop and remove the container:

sudo lxc stop teiserver-test && sudo lxc delete teiserver-test

External dependencies

Teiserver has a few external dependencies that are not managed by this playbook. Here we document what those are and how to configure them e.g. for local testing.

Email

Teiserver uses email for sending notifications via any SMTP server.

For local testing you can use smtp4dev that will simulate an SMTP server and you can browse all the emails sent to it via web interface.

You can run it like:

sudo podman run --rm -p 3000:80 -p 2525:25 rnwood/smtp4dev --tlsmode=StartTls

and configure the variables to point to port 2525 at whatever ip you are running it on.

Discord

You have to create a new Discord server and Discord bot to test this integration.

1. Create a new Discord server with the big "+" button on the server list
   1. Get GuildID: Go to settings -> Widget -> Server ID
2. Go to https://discord.com/developers/applications and create new application
   1. Go to Bot
   2. Name your bot something
   3. Click reset token to get the access token you will need for configuration
   4. Make sure “Message Content Intent” is enabled
   5. Go to Oauth2, and in OAuth2 URL Generator
      • Scopes: bot
      • Bot Permissions: Administrator
   6. Open the generated URL and install it in the test server
3. Fill in the 3 variables in the playbook and deploy new version
4. In the Teiserver web interface (I needed to restart the server for some of those changes to take effect):
   • Admin -> Site Config -> Discord: Enable the bridge and insert the channel IDs you want to bridge
   • Admin -> Text Callbacks: Add new text callbacks for the /textcb command on Discord

Autohost server

This isn't really a dependency, but it's quite useful for testing running of games etc. There are multiple ways it can be set up, but if you are using this playbook to setup prod-like environment, you can use the instruction in https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/ansible-spads-setup playbook to setup prod-like SPADs environment: It plays well with this one.