Deploying on a single server¶
Open Notificaties can be deployed on a single machine - either a dedicated server (DDS) or virtual private server (VPS). The required hardware can be rented from a hosting provider or be provided in your environment. Please see Hardware to determine the hardware requirements.
This documentation describes the architecture, prerequisites and how to deploy Open Notificaties on a server. Additionally, it documents the possible configuration options.
Note
The default settings allow Open Notificaties to be deployed to the same machine as Open Zaak.
Architecture¶
The application is deployed as Docker containers, of which the images are available on docker hub. Traffic is routed to the server, where the web server (nginx) handles SSL termination and proxies the requests to the application containers.
Data is stored in a PostgreSQL database. By default, the database is installed on the same machine (running on the host), but you can make use of a hosted database (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure…). See the Configuration parameters for more information.
Prerequisites¶
Before you can deploy, you need:
A server¶
Ensure you have a server with root
privileges. We assume you can directly
ssh to the machine as root
user. If that’s not the case, a user with
sudo
will also work. Python 3 must be available on the server.
Note
Make sure there is enough space in /var/lib/docker
. You need at
least 8 GB to download all Docker container images.
Supported operating systems
Support for different Linux flavours is maintained in the Ansible collection used for deployment.
Currently the following OS flavours are supported:
Debian: buster (10, actively supported), stretch (9, actively supported), jessie (8)
Ubuntu: eoan (EOL), disco (EOL), cosmic (EOL), bionic (18.04 LTS). focal (20.04 LTS) is not tested yet
SUSE Enterprise Linux: 15 (actively supported)
OpenSUSE: 15.1
Red Hat: 7, 8
CentOS: 7, 8 (actively supported)
A copy of the deployment configuration¶
You can either clone the https://github.com/open-zaak/open-notificaties repository, or download and extract the latest ZIP: https://github.com/open-zaak/open-notificaties/archive/main.zip
Python and a Python virtualenv¶
You will need to have at least Python 3.5 installed on your system. In the examples, we assume you have Python 3.6.
Create a virtualenv with:
[user@laptop]$ python3.6 -m venv env/
[user@laptop]$ source env/bin/activate
Make sure to install the deployment tooling. In your virtualenv, install the dependencies:
(env) [user@laptop]$ pip install -r deployment/requirements.txt
(env) [user@laptop]$ ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml
(env) [user@laptop]$ ansible-galaxy role install -r requirements.yml
Deployment¶
Deployment is done with an Ansible playbook, performing the following steps:
Install and configure PostgreSQL database server
Install the Docker runtime
Install the SSL certificate with Let’s Encrypt
Setup Open Notificaties with Docker
Install and configure nginx as reverse proxy
Initial steps¶
Make sure the virtualenv is activated:
[user@laptop]$ source env/bin/activate
Navigate to the correct deployment directory:
(env) [user@laptop]$ cd deployment/single-server
Create the vars/open-notificaties.yml
file - you can find an example in
vars/open-notificaties.yml.example
. Generate a secret key using the
django secret key generator and put the value between single
quotes.
Configure the host by creating the hosts
file from the example:
(env) [user@laptop]$ cp hosts.example hosts
Edit the open-notificaties.gemeente.nl
to point to your actual domain name. You must
make sure that the DNS entry for this domain points to the IP address of your
server.
Warning
It’s important to use the correct domain name, as the SSL certificate
will be generated for this domain and only this domain will be whitelisted
by Open Notificaties! If you are using a private DNS name, then no SSL certificate
can be created via Letsencrypt - make sure to disable it by setting
certbot_create_if_missing=false
.
Running the deployment¶
Execute the playbook by running:
(env) [user@laptop]$ ansible-playbook open-notificaties.yml
Hint
If you have your secrets Ansible vault encrypted, make sure you have either:
set the
ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE
environment variable, orpass
--ask-vault-pass
flag toansible-playbook
.
If you need to override any deployment variables (see Configuration parameters), you can pass variables to
ansible-playbook
using the syntax:--extra-vars "some_var=some_value other_var=other_value"
.If you want to run the deployment from the same machine as where it will run (ie. install to itself), you can pass
--connection local
toansible-playbook
.If you cannot connect as
root
to the target machine, you can pass--user <user> --become --become-method=sudo --ask-become-pass
which will connect as user<user>
that needssudo
-rights on the target machine to install the requirements.
A full example might look like this:
(env) [user@laptop]$ ansible-playbook open-notificaties.yml \
--user admin
--inventory my-hosts \ # Use inventory file ``my-hosts`` instead of ``hosts``.
--limit open-notificaties.gemeente.nl \ # Only pick open-notificaties.gemeente.nl from the inventory file.
--extra-vars "certbot_create_if_missing=false app_db_name=opennotificaties-test app_db_user=opennotificaties-test" \
--connection local \
--become \
--become-method=sudo \
--ask-become-pass
Note
You can run the deployment multiple times, it will not affect the final outcome. If you decide to change configuration parameters, you do not have to start from scratch.
Environment configuration¶
After the initial deployment, some initial configuration is required. This configuration is stored in the database and is only needed once.
Create a superuser
A superuser allows you to perform all administrative tasks.
Log in to the server:
[user@laptop]$ ssh root@open-notificaties.gemeente.nl
Create the superuser (interactive on the shell). Note that the password you type in will not be visible - not even with asterisks. This is normal.
[root@open-notificaties.gemeente.nl]# docker exec -it opennotificaties-0 src/manage.py createsuperuser Gebruikersnaam: demo E-mailadres: admin@open-notificaties.gemeente.nl Password: Password (again): Superuser created successfully.
Configure Open Notificaties Admin
See the Open Notificaties configuration on how to configure Open Notificaties post-installation.
Configuration parameters¶
At deployment time, you can configure a number of parts of the deployment by
overriding variables. You can override variables on the command line (using the
-e "..."
syntax) or by overriding them in vars/secrets.yml
.
Note
Tweaking configuration parameters is considered advanced usage.
Generic variables¶
certbot_admin_email
: e-mail address to use to accept the Let’s Encrypt terms and conditions.certbot_create_if_missing
: whether to use Let’s Encrypt to create an SSL certificate for your domain. Set tofalse
if you want to use an existing certificate.
Open Notificaties specific variables¶
The default values can be found in roles/opennotificaties/defaults/main.yml
.
opennotificaties_db_port
: database port. If you are running multiple PostgreSQL versions on the same machine, you’ll have to point to the correct port.opennotificaties_db_host
: specify the hostname if you’re using a cloud database or a database on a different server.opennotificaties_db_name
: specify a different database name.opennotificaties_secret_key
: A Django secret key. Used for cryptographic operations - this may NOT leak, ever. If it does leak, change it.
Scaling
The opennotificaties_replicas
variable controls scaling on backend services. If
your hardware allows it, you can create more replicas. By default, 3 replicas
are running.
The format of each replica is:
name: opennotificaties-i
port: 900i
The port number must be available on the host - i.e. you may not have other services already listening on that port.
The opennotificaties_worker_replicas
variable controls the scaling of the queue
workers - these are responsible for actually distributing the notifications. By default,
3 replicas spin up.
The format of each replica is:
name: opennotificaties-worker-i
Updating an Open Notificaties installation¶
Make sure you have the deployment tooling installed - see the installation steps for more details.
If you have an existing environment (from the installation), make sure to update it:
# fetch the updates from Github
[user@host]$ git fetch origin
# checkout the tag of the version you wish to update to, e.g. 1.0.0
[user@host]$ git checkout X.Y.z
# activate the virtualenv
[user@host]$ source env/bin/activate
# ensure all (correct versions of the) dependencies are installed
(env) [user@host]$ pip install -r requirements.txt
(env) [user@host]$ ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
Open Notificaties deployment code defines variables to specify the Docker image tag to use. This is synchronized with the git tag you’re checking out.
Next, to perform the upgrade, you run the open-notificaties.yml
playbook just like
with the installation in Running the deployment:
(env) [user@laptop]$ ansible-playbook open-notificaties.yml
Note
This will instruct the docker containers to restart using a new image. You may notice some brief downtime (order of seconds to minutes) while the new image is being downloaded and containers are being restarted.