CORD platform-install

This repository contains Ansible playbooks for installing and configuring software components that build a CORD POD: OpenStack, ONOS, and XOS.

It is used as a sub-module of the main CORD repository, but can independently bring up various CORD profiles for development work.

If you want to set up an entire CORD pod on physical hardware, or set up the Cord-in-a-Box deployment, you should start at the CORD repository.

Using platform-install for development

Bootstrapping your development environment

There's a helper script, scripts/cord-bootstrap.sh. that will install development environment prerequisites on a Ubuntu 14.04 node. You can download it with:

curl -o ~/cord-bootstrap.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/opencord/platform-install/master/scripts/cord-bootstrap.sh

Running the script will install the repo tool, Ansible, and Docker, as well as make a checkout of the CORD manifest into /opt/cord.

You can specify which gerrit changesets you would like repo to checkout using the -b option on the script as documented here.

Once you have done this, if you're not already in the docker group, you should logout and log back into your system to refresh your user account's group membership. If you don't do this, any docker command you run or ansible runs for you will fail. You can check your group membership by running groups.

Once you log back in, you may want to run tmux to maintain a server-side session you can reconnect to, in case of network trouble.

All of the commands below assume you're in the /opt/cord/build/platform-install directory.

Creating a development environment on you machine

If you are doing work that does not involve openstack you can create a development environment inside a VM on your local machine. This environment is mostly designed to do GUI, APIs and modeling related work. It can also be useful to test a synchronizer whose job is synchronizing data using REST APIs.

To do that we provided a Vagrant VM. From this folder just execute vagrant up head-node. We'll create an Ubuntu based VM with all the cord code shared from your local machine, so that you can make your changes locally and quickly test the outcome.

Once the vm is created you can connect to it with vagrant ssh head-node and then from the /opt/cord/build/platform-install execute the profile you are interested in. For instance you can spin up the frontend configuration with: ansible-playbook -i inventory/frontend deploy-xos-playbook.yml.

Note that the cord-bootstrap.sh script is automatically invoked by the provisioning script and the vagrant vm requires VirtualBox

Credentials

Credentials will be autogenerated and placed in the credentials/ directory when the playbooks are run, where the credential name is the filename, and the contents of the file is the password.

For most profiles the XOS admin user is named xosadmin@opencord.org.

Development Loop

Most profiles are run by specifying an inventory file when running ansible-playbook. For most frontend or mock profiles, you'll want to run the deploy-xos-playbook.yml playbook.

For example, to run the frontend config, you would run:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/frontend deploy-xos-playbook.yml

Setting up the initial environment, and launching XOS for the first time, will take about 30 minutes. You can then explore the environment you've set up.

Suppose you've made a change to your code and want the changes reflected in the running XOS containers. To get there, run:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/frontend redeploy-xos-playbook.yml

Rebuilding and redeploying containers using this method will usually take much less time than the initial setup phase. All changes to the local environment's source tree should be reflected in the redeployed containers. Note that running the above playbook will preserve the existing database.

When you're ready to tear down your environment, for example to switch to another profile, or to launch the current profile again from a fresh database, run:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/frontend teardown-playbook.yml

This will destroy all the docker containers created. Note that you must run the teardown-playbook.yml using the same inventory file it was created with, otherwise rogue docker containers may still be running after the teardown.

You can then make changes to code and re-run the same or a different profile.

Creating a new CORD profile

To create a new CORD profile, you should:

  1. Create an inventory file in inventory/ that defines the cord_profile variable, with the name of your profile.
[all:vars]
cord_profile=my-profile

  1. Create a .yaml variables file in profile_manifests/ with the name of your profile (ex: my-profile.yaml), and populate it with your configuration.

  2. To test the profile, run the deploy-xos-playbook.yml playbook using your inventory profile: ansible-playbook -i inventory/my-profile deploy-xos-playbook.yml

Making changes and lint checking your changes

Before commit, please run ./scripts/lintcheck.sh . in the repo root, which will perform the same ansible-lint check that Jenkins performs when in review in gerrit.

Specific profiles notes

api-test

This profile runs API tests for both the REST and TOSCA APIs. This can be done in an automated fashion:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/api-test api-test-playbook.yml

The XOS credentials in this config are padmin@vicci.org and letmein (until the tests are modified to support generated credentials).

frontend

Builds a basic XOS frontend installation, useful for UI testing and experimentation.

mock-rcord, mock-mcord

Builds a Mock R-CORD or Mock M-CORD pod, without running service synchronizers in a manner similar to frontend.

opencloud

Used as a part of the OpenCloud deployment. Similar to rcord.

rcord

This is a part of the R-CORD deployment - start using the steps specified in that repo.

This profile is designed to integrate XOS with physical infrastructure pieces like MaaS, OpenStack, and ONOS. See the CORD-in-a-Box Quick Start Guide for how to set up a virtual multi-node R-CORD pod on a single host.

If you've already built a CiaB and want to go through the dev loop described above on the head/production node, when running ansible-playbook you must pass the path to the configuration file that was generated by Gradle during the build:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/head-localhost --extra-vars @../genconfig/config.yml playbook.yml

You may find the following shell aliases to be helpful during development:

alias xos-teardown="pushd /opt/cord/build/platform-install; ansible-playbook -i inventory/head-localhost --extra-vars @/opt/cord/build/genconfig/config.yml teardown-playbook.yml"
alias xos-launch="pushd /opt/cord/build/platform-install; ansible-playbook -i inventory/head-localhost --extra-vars @/opt/cord/build/genconfig/config.yml launch-xos-playbook.yml"
alias compute-node-refresh="pushd /opt/cord/build/platform-install; ansible-playbook -i /etc/maas/ansible/pod-inventory --extra-vars=@/opt/cord/build/genconfig/config.yml compute-node-refresh-playbook.yml"

With these aliases, tearing down XOS and rebuilding it from a fresh database becomes:

xos-teardown; xos-launch; compute-node-refresh

Design Notes for Developers

Variables used in platform-install

cord_profile: name of the profile_manifest to use.

Paths on configuration node (where playbooks are run, may also be build node)

  • config_cord_dir location on configuration node of cord dir
  • config_cord_profile_dir location on configuration node of cord_profile dir
  • pki_dir, ssh_pki_dir: where SSL and SSH certificates are created on config node
  • credentials_dir - location where autogenerated passwords file are created

Paths on head node (target system operated on by playbooks)

  • head_cord_dir - where the cord directory is copied to on the head node (deprecated when we reach container-only deploys)
  • head_cord_profile_dir - location of the cord_profile directory on the head node
  • head_onos_cord_dir - location of the onos-cord directory on the head node
  • head_onos_fabric_dir - location of the onos-fabric directory on the head node

Style notes

Prefix every role file with the yaml start block and comment with name of file relative to role base.

---
# rolename/tasks/main.yml

When using templates, put the template filename and path within the role as a comment in the template so that it's easy to determine which template was used to create a file after it's been created.

If you use a variable that isn't created by the ansible setup task, define it in the role defaults file. The default value for anay variable must be the same across all role defaults.

Use the YAML style syntax for tasks, not the older = syntax, as the former is more likely to indent and syntax highlight properly in most editors.

Roles should always have the same outcome, so avoid using conditionals or tags to change the behavior of a role.