Archive for the ‘Continuous Delivery’ Category

create virtualbox on fly using veewee

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

one headache of using vagrant is to have base box, and creating basebox from scratch is headache, and how to solve it ?

You want to create by yourself for some framework, please wait for a minute, there already had one project veewee, and I don’t want to repeat the nice blog http://www.ducea.com/2011/08/15/building-vagrant-boxes-with-veewee/ as well.

Below just some tips when I tried this morning

veewee tips

veewee directory structure

I prefer to create one seperate veewee directory for this tasks.
iso files should be download in advance, and make a softlink under created directory iso.
then you can define your own basebox like below

~/veewee$ vagrant basebox define 'ubuntu1104' 'ubuntu-11.04-server-i386'

the directory will looks like below, you type command under veewee directory

~/veewee$ find
.
./definitions
./definitions/myubuntubox
./definitions/myubuntubox/postinstall.sh
./definitions/myubuntubox/preseed.cfg
./definitions/myubuntubox/definition.rb
./definitions/ubuntu1104
./definitions/ubuntu1104/postinstall.sh
./definitions/ubuntu1104/preseed.cfg
./definitions/ubuntu1104/definition.rb
./iso
./iso/ubuntu-11.04-server-i386.iso
virtualbox headless

suppose it should work headless (without GUI), while when I create basebox, it pops error on keyboard permisson, and when I enable my X11 display (since I tried it in my local linux server), it pops up virtualbox GUI and start to install.

it is excellent feeling when you see it is under auto-installtion.

configure apt proxy

since I try this in the company, I need to setup the proxy, it is fine to add the line export http_proxy=http://proxy:8080 in the beginning of postinstall.cfg, and it works fine.

look inside of veewee

the architecture of veewee looks great, it adds subcommand in vagrant, and all the majoy information are put into definition.rb

Veewee::Session.declare({
  :cpu_count => '1', :memory_size=> '384',
  :disk_size => '10140', :disk_format => 'VDI', :hostiocache => 'off',
  :o s_type_id => 'Ubuntu',
  :iso_file => "ubuntu-11.04-server-i386.iso",
  :iso_src => "http://releases.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-11.04-server-i386.iso",
  :iso_md5 => "ce1cee108de737d7492e37069eed538e",
  :iso_download_timeout => "1000",
  :boot_wait => "10", :boot_cmd_sequence => [
    '',
    '/install/vmlinuz noapic preseed/url=http://%IP%:%PORT%/preseed.cfg ',
    'debian-installer=en_US auto locale=en_US kbd-chooser/method=us ',
    'hostname=%NAME% ',
    'fb=false debconf/frontend=noninteractive ',
    'keyboard-configuration/layout=USA keyboard-configuration/variant=USA console-setup/ask_detect=false ',
    'initrd=/install/initrd.gz -- '
  ],
  :kickstart_port => "7122", :kickstart_timeout => "10000", :kickstart_file => "preseed.cfg",
  :ssh_login_timeout => "10000", :ssh_user => "vagrant", :ssh_password => "vagrant", :ssh_key => "",
  :ssh_host_port => "7222", :ssh_guest_port => "22",
  :sudo_cmd => "echo '%p'|sudo -S sh '%f'",
  :shutdown_cmd => "shutdown -P now",
  :postinstall_files => [ "postinstall.sh"], :postinstall_timeout => "10000"
})

it will be used during boot time to trigger the auto-installation, different os will use own auto-installation method, preseed.cfg is used for ubuntu/debian, if for suse then kickstart is used. postinstall.sh is used when the os is installed and rebooted.

summary

with those tool stacks (virtualbox,vagrant,puppet, veewee), your work makes more easily, don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t DIY. Use others brain.

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make ci easier with jenkins CI and Vagrant

Friday, October 21st, 2011

Last time, I mentioned the nice tool for vagrant which can control virtualbox virtual machines easily, at once I start to think how it can be used in CI system easily.

Also I noticed the question @ stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6941547/how-to-combine-vagrant-with-jenkins-for-the-perfect-continuous-integration-envir/7830173#7830173, and my suggestion is below

Separate virtual machines environment

Why

Mostly your jenkins server is used for lots of tasks, therefore it is run mostly by restricted user, for example it is tomcat6 if running as servlet, or normal jenkins user, and mostly they don’t have shell access to avoid problem.

Vagrant may needs lots of 3pps which may different with normal jenkins user.

Therefore it is better to separate the virtual machine environment

Jenkins master/slave mode

This is the nice solution to solve this problem to isolate the environment, just new another node in your jenkins server (which is master) as below

image

It is communicated by ssh, and it will invoke the slave.jar automatically. And here I created the vagrant user for this, why ?

Reuse the ssh public/private key

If you played with vagrant, you know vagrant can access virtual machine via ssh without password, it because it uses the ssh public/private key.

Therefore I created the vagrant user and put the private/public key into ~vagrant/.ssh directory, mostly they are under /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.7/keys/, which is used by vagrant, if you don’t know where it is, please type vagrant ssh_config

image

Prepare the base box under vagrant user

Follow the normal vagrant guideline, and create one vm box, for example, I put it under ~/vm/ubuntu

New the CI job to control VM

Now it is time to configure a job to experience this, in jenkins master node, create a job in freestyle

image

Label Expression is the category we defined in slave node.

In the task (Build – Execute shell), jenkins slave try to go to that directory and start vagrant, then doing some simple tasks to evaulate whether it is done in our vm box.

image

!! REMEBER, this is done in slave mode using vagrant user !!

Now you can see the job is invoked in slave vagrant node

image

In the console output, you can notice the result

image

Summary

Using Vagrant in jenkins master/slave mode is perfect match for this job, you can get lots of flexibility using virtualmachine.
veewee is another layer above vagrant to control vm box more easily.

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learn vagrant – manage your virtualbox

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

image Probably you remember that I did a lot of investigation on how to manage the virtualbox via command line before, unfortunately my solution is not so elegant and I almost gave up !! because I think it should be solution outside (don’t reinvent your wheel)

And yes, vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) is the toolkit for this purpose.

Introduction

From webpage, it is mentioned “Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments” and it use virtualbox API to control the virtual machines, and I think the generated vm should be easily converted into other format, I quickly load the raw disk into vmware, it works as well (need check more)

The guideline from web is already clear enough, it needs ruby and virtualbox 4.1.*, and I download the box (I use http://www.vagrantbox.es/26/) from the webpage in advance

$ gem install vagrant
$ vagrant box add ubuntu-1104 talifun-ubuntu-11.04-server-i386.box$ vagrant init
$ vagrant up$ vagrant ssh

and now I can visit the virtual machines !!!, so easy so nice.

The virtualmachines images are put under ~/.vagrant.d/boxes, the ovf is not recognized by vmware, but the raw disk vmdk is almost ok for virtual machines.

Work with Puppet

Besides the vm management, another most interesting part is it use puppet to do provisioning the system, everything is set in puppet configuration files. (check my previous blog)

Then when the vm loaded, it will apply the setting from your puppet configuration

Take a look at the nice slides for how Vagrant & Puppet works together

Use cases

I think this blog indicates exactly what I dreamed for longer time, How we use Vagrant as a throwaway testing environment

  1. load existing base VM (vagrant)
  2. install product packages with wanted configuration (puppet)
  3. testing your product using your test case (like cucumber)
  4. finish the VM and update the relate webpage for the results.

In your CI environment, it can automatically control lots of VM with lots of testing.

Summary

imageVagrant is a very new toolkit and it is quicky got lots of attention in this area, take a look and use it in your testing lab, don’t reinvent your own wheel.

I think there should exist similar toolkits like vagrant for Amazon EC2, Xen with puppet.

And I will start experience real product soon.

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learn puppet 2 – install tomcat with web app

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

image Deploying Apache Tomcat Applications With Puppet is a good start point for using puppet to install tomcat.

Start without client/server mode

It is much easy to use puppet as installation tool in single node as well, “puppet apply” mode can be used to practice your .pp files locally, as example above

puppet --modulepath /srv/puppet-tomcat-demo/modules -v /srv/puppet-tomcat-demo/site.pp

it will automatically download the tomcat6 packages even openjdk packages for you.

The default port is 735 (<1024), which seems have permission problem at least for me, I simple changed it to 3735, then it works very well for me.

And there are two tips, more check http://www.devco.net/archives/2009/08/19/tips_and_tricks_for_puppet_debugging.php

  1. --debug is good option for more detail debug information under command line
  2. --parseonly is good to do syntax check

Client/server mode

ssl is still tricky

the ssl authentication is still trick, my two working virtual machines doesn’t work again, I delete all “*.pem”, it still doesn’t work, “*.yaml” is deleted as well, and put full domain name in puppet.conf, and it works. Actually I still don’t know what’s the clue, anyway it works again after 1 hour (!!!).

Put it as module

Move the tomcat as module under /etc/puppet, and put site.pp information to node.pp, the path is hard-coded first

path => '/srv/puppet-tomcat-demo/java_src/SimpleServlet.war'

It should exist in agent node first to make testing easy, when it works, we start to deal with puppet source

Puppet source

The resource should exist in server side or nfs server, let’s use server first

path => ‘puppet:///modules/tomcat/war/SimpleServlet.war’

it indicates to use puppet protocol (only support protocol so far), and actually it maps to /etc/puppet/modules/tomcat/files/war/SimpleServlet.war, and read the puppet wiki http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/file_serving.html is more clear for this.

Then it is quite clean in client side, well done.

Next step

Just think about how to switch to Sun (oracle) JRE, which is more stable for system and also start to think how to deal with own package system since currently the package comes from public repo.

just a record for my learning on puppet for auto-deployment.

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learn puppet – auto deployment

Friday, September 30th, 2011

image In contiuous delivery, auto deployment is one key issue, and puppet is one popular tools to implement this, and I spent two days to learn it.

Introduction

Probably you can start with the slides http://www.slideshare.net/teyotyree/puppet-talk-at-oscon-2010, in short, Puppet is an open source framework and toolset for managing the configuration of computer systems, you may care about the resource like ssh instead of real package, it is a nice weapon for sysadmin and our auto deployment.

Puppet itself is written by ruby, but mostly you just need to deal with configuration (DSL)

It may have other versions now, and I choose open source which is available for ubuntu.

Getting started

I prepare two virtual machines, which is created from ubuntu 11.04, one is puppet master (puppet, 192.168.56.100), another one acts as puppet agent (puppet1, 192.168.56.101).

> apt-get install puppet # agent/client
> apt-get install puppermaster # master

Then you can follow http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/manifests.html to write one simple puppet resource files like 1.file.pp to execute in agent machine to experience it.

So nice it will automatically regenerate it when the resource is not correct

Connect from agent to master

Next step is try to put the resource in master side, and auto install something from agent, I follow https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/serverguide/C/puppet.html to define apache2 package in master side.

Then in agent side to run command to verify it, wooh, the ssh connection is so weird, I spend 1 day to figure it out, see lesson learned.

> pupper agent –t

it will call the default master server (puppet) to fetch resource information, and notice it needs apache2, it will call internal command (guess apt-get) to install apache2 for me.

After I remove the apache2 package and run above command again, it is back as expected !!

> apt-get autoremove apache2

Module installation

Mostly besides package, you need deal with other issues, therefore in puppet, we need to bind everything into one module, Pro Puppet book had a very good example on how to customize apache configuration after installation, please go there and download the source codes (chapter02\apache)

user@puppet:/etc/puppet$ find modules/apache/
modules/apache/manifests/init.pp
modules/apache/manifests/install.pp
modules/apache/manifests/service.pp
modules/apache/manifests/vhost.pp
modules/apache/templates/vhost.conf.erb

user@puppet:/etc/puppet$ cat manifests/site.pp
import 'nodes.pp'

user@puppet:/etc/puppet$ cat manifests/nodes.pp
node "puppet1.example.com" {
  info "In node for ubuntu"
  include apache
  apache::vhost { 'puppet1':
    port => 80,
    docroot => '/var/www/puppet1',
    ssl => false,
    priority => 10,
    serveraliases => 'puppet1',
  }
}

When you put all these files under master node, and invoke it from agent node, it will install apache2 and customize the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/10-puppet1 configuration automatically.

Lesson learned

When it works, puppet is very good, but the log system and his structure may be complex to the beginner, so be aware of this and learn it step by step, if the environment is not good, it doesn’t work, and it may not give you correct direction why it doesn’t work.

ssl authentication is quite trick, be careful

one headache is the error message is not so clear and ssl itself is always troublesome especially if you are not expert on this area, I think my problem mainly is changing the hostname after the CA cerfication (ca.pem) is generated.

You may need check http://www.madboa.com/geek/openssl/ to figure out what is the problem

Be careful with the version

make sure you use the version 2.6.*+, origianlly one of my ubuntu server is 10.x based, which use puppet 2.5.x, lots of commands are different, so please make sure the version

Summary

Puppet is a wonderful tool, don’t reinvent the wheel to create your own scripts to deploy the system from the scratch, and this is just the start, I will dig into more to see how to use it connected within product deployment inside CI

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