Ansible LEMP and SSL Roles & Playbooks

We can use this repo to setup a LEMP stack on a fresh server. Setup Craft CMS or Laravel website and install Free SSL certificate (Letsencrypt).

Things to note

Before going any further. Make sure you have ansible installed on your machine.It is really simple. If you are using a Mac, simply run the follwowing commands in terminal:

sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install ansible

You can also read Ansible's installation docs here

Server Setup

To setup the server, First create a Ubuntu (At the time of writing the latest LTS is 16.04) server on Digital Ocean or Linode. Make a note if the IP address. Make sure you can SSH or have a root password for the server.

1. Clone this repo, open up the hosts file and add you server's IP address.
2. Run this command to make server ready for Ansible ansible-playbook -i hosts pre.yml
3. Once above command has successfully ran, You can now setup LEMP stack by running this command ansible-playbook -i hosts lemp.yml. This will take few minutes.
4. You can now type in your server's IP address in the browser and should see a success page. Your server is now provisioned and ready to host website.

Setup a website on the server

Once your server is up and running, you can now setup the website on it using site.yml playbook.

1. Open up site.yml file and update the domain name and the user name to the user you have created when setting up the server.
2. Run this command to setup the website ansible-playbook -Ki hosts site.yml. It will ask for the user's password. Type in the password and hit enter.
3. Once above command has successfully ran. It will create a website folder in /var/www/YOUR.DOMAIN You can now copy your website files in this folder.

Setting up SSL for the domain

This step should be carried after setting up a website on the server and pointing a domain name to the server. If you have successfully setup a website using the instructions provided in the above section then you can now setup and SSL certificate.

1. Open up ssl.yml file and update the domain name and the email address.
2. In terminal run ansible-playbook -Ki hosts ssl.yml. If ran successfully, you will now have SSL setup on your website. Simply test it by typing in your domain in a web browser.

Questions?

Should you have any questions or issues, feel free to send me a messsage. Contact me