This template demonstrates how to use Ansible and docker to automatically deploy a web service to a remote server from Gitlab.

The web service to be deployed is not included in this template. For demonstration services the configuration assumes that the service will be deployed in four parts:

• client: a website, bundled as a docker container
• server: a back-end server, also bundled as a docker container
• mongo: database server based on the official docker container
• haproxy: proxy server based on the haproxy-letsencrypt docker container (includes automatic and free ssl certificate generation for your domain)

The template can be easily extended to deploy additional docker containers, like a backup script, a static website or multiple back-end services, by adding new roles for each container and editing the haproxy configuration file as needed.

Ansible is used to install and maintain the docker containers on your servers. The folder ansible/ holds the Ansible configuration. There are two playbooks:

• setup sets up a new debian server
• update installs and updates the components of our web service

The hosts are specified in config/inventory. SSH keys are placed in config/ssh.

There are 5 roles:

• client installs a simple docker container with no dependencies (the client should access the back-end via the proxy server)
• common sets up new debian box with docker (this will need some tweaking depending on your setup and distribution)
• haproxy installs the proxy server. The configuration file contained might need some tweaking for your setup.
• mongo installs the database server. It is accessible from localhost via port 27017 and can be linked to other containers. It is not accessible from external hosts.
• server install another docker container with a dependency to the mongo container

The script run is used as the entry point for the docker container described below.

Docker is used to create a docker container from this repository. This docker container can be used to execute deployment tasks from a CI such as Gitlab-CI.

The docker configuration is stored in Dockerfile. It is based on a docker container by Jens Böttcher, which is appropriate for usage with Gitlab-CI.

To build the container run docker build -t my-ansible .. Then you can execute a playbook by running e.g. docker run my-ansible update.

Gitlab-ci.yml contains a sample configuration to automatically build this container. It also contains two manual tasks that can be triggered to call either playbook.

Gitlab-ci.client.yml contains a sample configuration for the client. You need to fill in how to build your client and add a Dockerfile. Then the client is containerized and pushed to the Gitlab registry. Finally, the deploy step will use the ansible container from this repository to deploy the client on your server.

Copyright (c) 2017 Jonathan Diehl

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

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