Ansible playbook for deploying a Commercio Network node

The playbook configures a server to be a Commercio Network full node and installs a script that detects whether the node is losing blocks. If the node loses blocks, a message will be forwarded to a slack channel of your choice.

WARNING: The playbook can use only for mainnet. Don't use it for testnet or devnet or localnet.

Prerequisites

The prerequisites to use this playbook are:

• Have a server on which to install the node
• Have python3 installed (version >= 3.5)
  • To check the version:

    python3 -V

• Have ansible installed (version >= core 2.9)
  • To check the version:

    ansible --version

• Have gantsign.golang installed for ansible
  • To install it:

    ansible-galaxy install gantsign.golang

Usage

To use the playbook you need to proceed as follows:

1. Create and add the hosts.ini file to the root directory of this repo. Example hosts file. Parameters:

   • ansible_host: IP of the machine
   • moniker: name of the node
   • external_drive: optional parameter to specify if the node database is to be installed on an external disk. Use this parameter to specify the path to that disk
   • comm_user: name of the user that will be created and used by the node service
   • sync_type: This parameter decides how database synchronization occurs. You can have 5 values:
     • pull: synchronization occurs by doing an rsync from the new node to the node from which it synchronizes.
     • push: synchronization occurs by doing an rsync from the node from which you synchronize to the new node.
     • dump: synchronization occurs by dumping the dump to disk and unpacking it.
     • statesync: synchronization occurs via statesync.
     • none: synchronization occurs normally.

   You can change the behavior of the playbook based on the variables indicated in the all file located in the main/group_vars path. Below is the table of their meaning:

   Variable name	Usage
   bin_version	Version of the Commercionetworkd binary to use
   chain_id	Blockchain chain-id
   genesis	Genesis file URL
   comm_repo	Path and name of where the Commercio.network binary repository is downloaded
   home_folder	Home where the .commercionetwork folder is installed
   go_path	Path of installed go
   cosmovisor_version	Version of Cosmovisor to install
   sync_node	Node IP to sync from in case of sync_type = push or pull
   sync_node_home_folder	Node home folder to sync from in case of sync_type = push or pull
   trust_rpc1	First RPC to sync from in case of sync_type = statesync
   trust_rpc2	Second RPC to sync from in case of sync_type = statesync
   slack_hook	Webhook where to send reports about a node losing blocks. No script will be installed if a webhook isn't set

2. Proceed to run the main playbook:

ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini main/commercio.yml

Run the playbook from the root folder of this repo.

Manual installation of the script

If you don't choose to install the script via the playbook you can install it manually, here's how:

1. Copy the script from main/post_install/tasks/test_height.sh on the server
2. Replace the {{ slack_hook }} variable in the file with your own slack webhook
3. Add the script to a crontab using the crontab -e command. We suggest running the script every 5 minutes

Troubleshooting

There may be errors when launching the playbook. These are the most common:

1. During the install_binary : Run 'make' on target step there may be a possible failure in compiling the binary due to the TestProcessTestSuite test not passing. The playbook will ignore the error and continue execution. The binary still compiles and will work fine.

2. During the setup_configuration : Download genesis file step, a possible failure in the genesis download may occur. This error is caused by Github not responding to the request correctly. In this case the playbook will stop. This error rarely occurs and it will be enough to restart the playbook to complete the configuration.