Ansible role for diaspora*

This Ansible role aims to automate the setup and maintenance of a diaspora* pod as much as possible. All configuration that is normally supported by diaspora* configuration files can be given through variables in this role.

The role is meant to not just create, but update and maintain the pod, so re-running the role will pull in latest code, run migrations, etc. Note however that server upgrades are not in the scope of this role.

This role by default deploys a pod in production mode. For development, please follow the normal install instructions, as developers need to be familiar with that stuff anyway.

What is diaspora*? Find out here.

Requirements

Ansible

Requires 2.x.

Third-party roles

• geerlingguy.nodejs
• jaywink.letsencrypt # If using LetsEncrypt certificates

Hardware

This role includes a slightly more light weight configuration than the default instructions. However, a minimum of 1GB of RAM is still recommended to run diaspora* for a small amount of users.

OS

Currently only Ubuntu targets have verified. Ubuntu versions below have been verified to work:

• 14.04 (Trusty)
• 15.04 (Vivid)
• 18.04 (Bionic)

15.10 is not supported, see this issue.

Pull requests welcome to include other platforms!

Database

PostgreSQL only for now. Pull requests welcome for MySQL/MariaDB!

Web server

Apache2 only for now. Pull requests welcome for other options!

Diaspora* versions supported

This role has been tested with stable releases up to 0.7. Anything else might work but is not tested.

When diaspora* pushes out a new release or major changes to the develop branch, it is possible this role will start to fail. Please follow the author for news and updates regarding this role.

Configuration

Default configuration can be found in defaults/main.yaml. Please make a copy of it for your pod and tune the settings to your needs. You can also just override the ones you want.

The configuration is split into 4 main parts:

• Role configuration. This part contains things like repository information and the user on the target machine to install diaspora* on.
• Diaspora* configuration. Anything inside diaspora_yml is part of the diaspora* normal configuration and will get dumped as is into config/diaspora.yml. This means you can set any available configuration values into this YAML object, and they will be available for diaspora*. Only a part of the possible items are included in the defaults. Check diaspora* configuration example for the full list.
• Database configuration. These will be injected into config/database.yml.
• SSL certificates. Use ansible-letsencrypt or specify full certificates in config, which will be copied to relevant locations.

SSL

Default configuration will make the pod run on HTTPS. And we're not going to help you figure out how to run it on HTTP.

There are two options, controlled by setting use_ansible_letsencrypt:

1. Use ansible-letsencrypt. This is default so all you need to do is set the correct ansible-letsencrypt variables in your config!
2. Specify full certificates in config, which will be copied to relevant locations.

Database

By default the role will install PostgreSQL and create a user and database.

Disable this by setting db_setup_database: false.

Domain name

Before creating your pod, obviously you need to think of a domain name. This cannot be changed in diaspora*, though the role doesn't enforce this. Changing it will break everything in your pod though!

Make sure to place the domain name in these variables:

• domainname
• diaspora_yml.configuration.environment.url

Automatic restarts on memory amount

If you set diaspora_restart_on_memory setting to a number (MB), a cron job will restart the diaspora* server hourly if this amount of memory has been taken by the Sidekiq process which is known to hog a large amount of memory.

Running your pod

Once deployed, the pod will be available and running. That's it! A few things to note though.

• After creating your first account, please see the diaspora* wiki on how to make yourself an admin. The setting diaspora_yml.configuration.admins.account should be set to your username to ensure you see the admin panel. Rerun role now.
• Consider setting diaspora_yml.configuration.settings.enable_registrations to false if you don't want to have other people signing up.
• If you need to for some reason do some manual stop/start actions to the pod, it is governed by Upstart or SystemD, depending on your OS version. Log into your server and do the normal sudo service diaspora stop/start/restart etc as per other Ubuntu services. Replace service name with whatever you set in servicename variable, if you changed that.

Backups

There are two variables that if set will collect database and uploaded image backups for collection to backups/ under the diaspora* user home folder.

• diaspora_backups_copypath - set this to path + file glob to select DB backup dump. Most recent file will be picked. For example: /var/lib/postgresql/backups/diaspora*
• diaspora_backups_key - set this to a secret key, DB backup dump will be encrypted using GPG with this as the passphrase.

Uploaded images will be available as a diaspora_{{ os_user }}_images.tar.gz file in the backups folder, depending on the os_user variable (by default 'diaspora').

A cron job will be set to do this backups collection daily.

Note! Collecting the backups doesn't help against data loss - make sure to sync the backups daily to another location!

Contact

• Fediverse: https://jasonrobinson.me
• Matrix: @jaywink:federator.dev
• email: mail@jasonrobinson.me

License

MIT.

The role author takes no responsibility for what this role does when you run it. If your server melts down, or the stock markets collapse, or the world burns in fire - I am not responsible. Normally, you should just get a nice little diaspora* pod though.