Deploy User

This role creates a deploy user, to ease deployment when using with deploy keys on services like Github, or Bitbucket. I created this after initially finding the deployment process with slightly fiddly, and wanting to avoid messing around with sudo and ssh environment variables just to deploy an web app.

This is written with the assumption it is being used on Debian, or Debian based operating systems, like Ubuntu.

Requirements

None

Role Variables

The following variables are set in defaults.yml for the role:

deploy_user_name: deploy
deploy_user_ssh_priv_key_path: lookup('file', '~/.ssh/id_rsa')
deploy_groups: webapp, www-data

Explaining these roles:

• deploy_user_name is the name of the deploy to create. By default they have a home directory
• deploy_user_ssh_priv_key_path is the path to the private-key for the deploy user. The corresponding public key would be entered into the github project at https://github.com/{username}/{project}/settings/keys.
• deploy_groups: typically the same group as a web server, or developers, to allow them to ssh in to troubleshoot if necessary.

Dependencies

None

Example Playbook

You would typically use this before using the Ansible git module, to put the deploy user's private key onto the server, so it can be used during automated deployments. Assuming we had defined a app_name and git_branch defined in our playbook vars, we might use it in the playbook might like so:

- hosts: webapps
  roles:
     - productscience.deploy_user

- tasks:

  - name: fetch code from github repo, using the deploy key
    git: [email protected]:productscience/some_project.git
         dest=/var/www/{{ app_name }}
         accept_hostkey=True
         version={{ git_branch }}
         key_file=/home/{{ deploy_user_name }}/.ssh/deploy

  - name: gracefully reload app server with new code
    service: name={{appname}} state=reloaded

This would ssh into github using the deploy user's private key, and checkout the desired git branch into /var/www/{{ app_name }}, before the reloading the server to serve the latest version of the application to users.

License

MIT

Author Information

This is part of a set of open sourced roles used by Product Science, for deploying and managing web applications. For more, see productscience.co.uk, or email [email protected]