Cloudless Box

cloudless-box is an opinionated Chef cookbook that allows to run one or more Ruby on Rails, Node, Meteor or Middleman applications on single server with databases, backup and more. It's targeted at VPS and dedicated servers that run CentOS Linux.

Who is it for?

1. Everyone who wants to have one or more Ruby on Rails, Node, Meteor, Middleman applications or static websites on single, blazing fast and secure web server without spending a dozen days configuring it and committing suicide on server or data failure.
2. Everyone who got used to easy deployments, such as those on Heroku, but wants it faster, cheaper and under control. With cloudless-box, deploying new app is a matter of adding few lines to server's JSON config plus you get similar env variables like DATABASE_URL.
3. Everyone who is tired of configuring and executing deployment for each app separately (ie. Capistrano) - cloudless-box can handle all deployments at once. Of course you can still opt for custom deployment strategies by omitting single configuration line.
4. Everyone who don't know their way around Chef - cloudless-box comes with complete setup guide, possible to follow by people unfamiliar with server cookery. You are assumed to have basic *NIX terminal skills and a shiny new server with CentOS on it.

What do you get?

1. Nginx web server with Passenger for running Rack and Node apps.
2. Ability to access apps with server's subdomains or with custom domains.
3. Separate PostgreSQL, MongoDB and/or Redis databases for all apps.
4. Automatic solution to backup all databases to S3 on daily basis.
5. Preconfigured server essentials: SSH, IPTables and NTP.
6. Preconfigured web development essentials: Git, Bower, ImageMagick and FFmpeg.
7. Per-app cron tasks with whenever's expressive syntax.

Installation

This section guides users unfamiliar with Chef through a complete process of setting up cloudless-box on their own server conveniently managed by the Hosted Chef server. If you've already wrapped your head around Hosted Chef, Berkshelf and Knife, you can skip this section and just use this cookbook as usually.

Prepare Chef

First, visit the Get Chef page, download Chef Development Kit for your operating system and install it. Then, visit the Hosted Chef page and sign in to Chef Manage or register for a free account.

If you've just created new account, you'll have to authorize your computer with the Chef server. Visit Chef Manage and navigate to Administration » Organizations. There, you can download the Starter Kit. Do so. After downloading it, copy Chef credentials to your home directory:

mkdir ~/.chef
cp /.chef/* ~/.chef/

You are now ready to work with your Hosted Chef server.

Prepare cookbooks

Next step is to upload cloudless-box to your Hosted Chef server. Invoke the following:

git clone https://github.com/karolsluszniak/cloudless-box.git
cd cloudless-box
berks install
berks upload

Now you have cloudless-box cookbook and all its dependencies ready on your Hosted Chef server.

Bootstrap new server

Go back to Chef Manage page and create configuration for your server:

1. Navigate to Policy » Environments and click Create.
2. Name the environment and click Next.
3. On Constraints tab, select cloudless-box and enter current version of cloudless-box (you can find it at Policy » Cookbooks).
4. Next is Default attributes tab. It's here where you write JSON that lists and configures your server's apps according to the Usage section below.

You can leave attributes empty and start by bootstrapping cloudless-box without any apps. It'll still take a while to install server essentials so you'll have the time to read the Usage section and fill needed attributes.

Finally, you can bootstrap your server with the following command:

knife bootstrap 
 --ssh-user root --ssh-password  --sudo --use-sudo-password --node-name  --environment  --run-list 'recipe[cloudless-box]'

That's it! You can re-provision the server by logging into it and executing:

chef-client

This is usually done when your web apps were updated and they need re-deploy or when you have changed your server's environment attributes.

You can repeat this step for each server that you want to govern with cloudless-box. You can manage up to 5 servers with a free Hosted Chef server.

Secure new server

It's recommended to disable root user after completing the bootstrap and using sudo-enabled account for future server visits. This step is not directly related to this cookbook, nor is it required, but it's strongly recommended for improving security.

In order to create new user, invoke the following:

adduser 
gpasswd -a  wheel
passwd 

Finish by entering your new user's password. Now you should be able to log into your server with new account. You can re-provision your server at any time using new account with:

sudo chef-client

Next, let's disable root user completely. Invoke the following:

passwd -d root
yum -y install nano
nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Move to the end of the file and add the following:

PermitRootLogin no

Hit Ctrl+O and Ctrl+X. Finish by restarting SSH:

service sshd restart

Usage

Cookbook is configured via attributes, usually set as JSON in server's environment attributes on the Chef Manage page. They may also be set as role default/override attributes or in any other fashion available in Chef.

After changing attributes, you should re-run chef-client on your server in order to apply new ones.

Example

A complete JSON configuration may look like this:

{
  "cloudless-box": {
    "applications": {
      "my-rails-app": {
        "layout": "rails",
        "ruby": "2.2.2",
        "postgresql": true,
        "url": "my-rails-app.com",
        "repository": "git@bitbucket.org:user/repo.git",
        "env": {
          "aws_s3_bucket": "(...)",
          "aws_access_key_Id": "(...)",
          "aws_secret_access_key": "(...)"
        }
      },
      "my-meteor-app": {
        "layout": "meteor",
        "mongodb": true,
        "repository": "git@github.com:user/repo.git"
      },
      "my-node-app": {
        "layout": "node",
        "bower": true,
        "repository": "git@bitbucket.org:user/repo.git",
        "env": {
          "google_analytics_id": "(...)"
        },
        "nginx": {
          "client_max_body_size": "2M"
        }
      }
    },
    "backup": {
      "bucket": "(...)",
      "access_key_id": "(...)",
      "secret_access_key": "(...)"
    },
    "secret": "my-server-secret"
  }
}

Below, you'll find a complete list of attributes available for configuring applications and other aspects of the cloudless-box cookbook.

Applications

You should list your applications in the node["cloudless-box"]["applications"] object. Object key specifies an application name, while object value may have the following attributes:

All attributes are optional and have sensible defaults. If none will be set, you'll end up with a system account for static, undeployed website without any database or addon on your server.

Packages like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Ruby version manager, Meteor or Bower will not be installed on your system until any of your apps requests them. This will keep your system as lightweight as possible.

Removing applications from the node["cloudless-box"]["applications"] list will not remove them from your server. You'll have to do that manually by removing the deploy-<app-name> account along with all its files as well as Nginx site configuration.

Environment variables

A number of default environment variables will be set for you in each app's:

• Bash profile
• shared/.env file
• Passenger settings

Built-in variables include:

You can add your own environment variables by listing them in the node["cloudless-box"]["applications"]["<app-name>"]["env"] object. Keys in this object will be automatically converted to upper case and your variables will be set in all places mentioned above.

See example for a more clear picture of setting environment variables.

Private repositories

If some of your applications are stored on private repositories, their initial deploy will fail due to SSH access denial. In such case, you'll see error messages but the whole chef-client run will finish with remaining tasks. Among others, it will still create system accounts and SSH keys for these applications. You can display SSH key for specific app with the following command:

sudo cat /home/deploy-/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Add this key as a deployment key in your app's repo settings on GitHub or BitBucket and re-provision with chef-client to finish the deployment.

Secret

You should set node["cloudless-box"]["secret"] to add additional secret component for generating various secret hashes across your server in order to improve its security. You can also configure per-app secrets for even more security.

Backup

Simply add S3 backup credentials to have a daily backup of all your PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases. Set node["cloudless-box"]["backup"] to an object with bucket, access_key_id and secret_access_key keys.

Backup will only be enabled for database types that are actually used by configured applications.

Whenever

Whenever allows to write cron jobs with a human-readable, clean syntax. All you have to do is add config/schedule.rb file to your application and cloudless-box will automatically update your app's cron table at the end of every deployment.

Firewall

This cookbook will add exclusion rules for SSH and HTTP and close all other ports for security. You can stop cloudless-box from touching your firewall settings by setting node["cloudless-box"]["firewall"] to false.