Minitwit

A DevOps project made by Group D, composed of:

• Madeleine Jakobsen majak@itu.dk
• Tim Hounsgaard thou@itu.dk
• Mohamed Karam Haybout mhay@itu.dk
• Oriol Grau Moragues s25137@itu.dk
• Jordan Carter Cherry s25121@itu.dk

Minitwit is a miniblogging site built using ASP.NET where users can post short messages and follow one another.

Contributing

All contributions need to be made on a new branch. Once ready, a pull request should be opened to merge the new branch into the staging branch. Once the CI/CD checks are successful, a pull request can be opened from staging to main. This will deploy the changes to a staging environment where they can be validated. After ensuring that everything is correct, the pull request can be merged and the changes will be automatically deployed to production.

Deployment

Pre-requisites

• You must either create an SSH key or use an existing one on your local machine. Afterwards, you must add it to your DigitalOcean Team to allow access to the VPS (official documentation page).
• You must either create or have access to an existing personal access token to control your DigitalOcean resources (official documentation page).
• You must either create or have access to an existing full access key for DigitalOcean Spaces.
• You need to install the following tools:
  • Ansible
  • Terraform
• You need a registered domain name with a registrar of your choice and access to its configuration.

Deploying the infrastructure

Before deploying, review the following files to adjust the configuration to your needs:

• variables.yml:

  • Adjust the number of instances to be created for each component.

    default = {
      "web" = 2,
      "lb" = 2
    }
    

  • Specify the naming pattern.

    variable "instance_prefix" {
      description = "Prefix for Droplet names"
      default = "itu-minitwit"
    } 
    

  • Specify the server region.

    variable "region" {
      description = "DigitalOcean server region"
      default = "fra1"
    }
    

  • Specify the server image.

    variable "image" {
      description = "OS image to use for the Droplets"
      default = "ubuntu-22-04-x64"
    }
    

• env.template: Prior to running the deploy.sh script (described in the paragraph below), you'll need to specify the values of the variables in env.template. On the first run, the script will make a copy for you of the template in a file named .env where you will need to fill in the values.

• ansible/group_vars/all.yml:

  • Specify the domain name that you have registered for this project. Be sure to specify which subdomain should be used when deploying to a staging environment.

    domain_name: "{{ 'iac-test11.bettertwitter.ninja' if env == 'Staging' else 'bettertwitter.ninja' }}"

  • Specify which email address should be tied to the HTTPS certificates generated by Let's Encrypt. Note that this email address will be publicly accessible.

    letsencrypt_email: 24841687+usern132@users.noreply.github.com

  • Specify the app name that should be used for the configuration. This does not affect any functionality and is only used for naming different parts of the system as well as the cloud resources.

    app_name: "itu-minitwit"

  • Should you modify the services that make up the project, be sure to update their ports and subdomains accordingly. These ports are read by Ansible and are used during the configuration process.

    subdomains:
    - prefix: "www"
      port: 5001
      include_root: true
    - prefix: "api"
      port: 8080
    - prefix: "grafana"
      port: 3000

Deployment script

Infrastructure can be deployed by executing the deploy.sh script, which will create the necessary resources on DigitalOcean using OpenTofu and configure them using Ansible. The creation of DNS A records requires manual intervention on your behalf. The script will output which subdomains need DNS A records and to which address they must point. Upon setting up your (sub)domain(s) on your chosen registrar, confirm your action and the provisioning process will continue.

OpenTofu's state is stored on a bucket (DigitalOcean Spaces), which allows the deployment scripts to be executed on any machine, including CI/CD runners without losing state synchronization. OpenTofu will always fetch the state data from the bucket.

Note on database migrations

Database migrations must stay compatible with rolling upgrades. CI checks newly changed EF migrations for destructive operations such as drops, renames, and column alterations. If a contraction migration is intentional and has been reviewed for rollout safety, mark the migration with:

// rolling-upgrade-reviewed

Deletion

To tear down all infrastructure created during deployment, execute the destroy.sh script.

⚠️ Warning: this action is irreversible and all data stored on the VMs will be lost. OpenTofu will ask for confirmation before proceeding with the deletion.

Video demonstrations

Monitoring dashboards in action

Logging dashboard in action

IaC in action

CI/CD in action