Dev-in-a-Box

Minimal evaluation site with no compute services

Intro

To get familiar with the setup procedures for chi-in-a-box, or to develop services, you can follow this (very) minimal setup guide.

Note: This doesn't include support for HAProxy, TLS, or any compute services (Nova, Ironic, or Zun). Please don't use this guide for a production site, as it compromises security and reliability for simplicity.

Prerequisites:

Baremetal or Virtual Machine with 4 cores, 8 gb ram, 40gb disk.

You must have a user account on the machine with passwordless sudo.

Installation

1. Prepare a working directory. We use /opt by convention. It must be writable by your current user.

   cd /opt
   sudo chown cc:cc /opt

2. Clone the chi-in-a-box repo, install, and initialize your site-configuration

   git clone https://github.com/ChameleonCloud/chi-in-a-box
   cd chi-in-a-box
   ./cc-ansible --site /opt/site-config/ init

3. export an env var so you don't need to type "--site" for the remaining commands

   export CC_ANSIBLE_SITE=/opt/site-config/

4. Create a dummy loopback interface to bind services to. You can choose whatever interface name and IP you want. The name will be later used for the network_interface and the IP for kolla_internal_vip_address in the next step.

   ip link add name diab type dummy
   ip addr add 10.100.100.1/32 dev diab

5. Edit /opt/site-config/defaults.yml to contain ONLY the following lines.

   ---
   kolla_base_distro: ubuntu
   network_interface: diab
   kolla_internal_vip_address: 10.100.100.1
   enable_haproxy: no
   
   # Disable central logging to reduce resource usage (no elasticsearch or kibana)
   enable_central_logging: no
   # Disable prometheus to speed up deployment
   enable_prometheus: no

6. Bootstrap the controller node, this will install apt packages, configure Docker, and modify /etc/hosts

   ./cc-ansible bootstrap-servers

7. Run prechecks to ensure common issues are avoided.

   ./cc-ansible prechecks

   • this will probably yell about nscd.service. If so, run the following, then rerun prechecks.

     sudo systemctl disable --now nscd.service

8. Next, we'll pull container images for all configured services. This is done by running:

   ./cc-ansible pull

9. We now need to generate the configuration that all of these services will use. This will combine the upstream defaults, contents of chi-in-a-box, and your site-config, and template config files into /etc/kolla/<service_name>

   ./cc-ansible genconfig

   • If you've added additional configuration, this step can warn you about invalid or missing config values, before actually modifying any running containers.

   • Even if the step passes, you may want to inspect files under /etc/kolla/ to make sure they match your expectations.

10. Finally, we want to deploy the containers for each service. This step will start each necessary container, including running one-off bootstrap steps. If you've updated any of the service configurations, this step will restart the relevant containers and apply that config. Technically, this step includes the genconfig step above, but it's mentioned separately for clarity.

    ./cc-ansible deploy

11. If all the steps so far have passed, all the core services should now be running! However, this isn't everything needed for a useful cloud. post-deploy consists of all the steps that require a functioning control plane. These include:

    1. Creating default networks

    2. Creating compute "flavors"

    3. Uploading default disk images for users to use

    4. Installing various hammers and other utility services/cron-jobs.

    5. To run this step, execute:

       ./cc-ansible post-deploy

12. Use your site! You can access it by the following methods:

    1. Horizon is listening on 127.0.0.1:80, you can access it by forwarding your browser over SSH, for example via sshuttle. The username is admin, and the password can be viewed by running the following command:

       ./cc-ansible view_passwords | grep "^keystone_admin_password"

    2. You can use the Openstack CLI or API directly. The CLI tools are pre-installed in the chi-in-a-box virtualenv, and the admin credentials in an admin-openrc file in your site-config directory. Access the tools as follows:

       source /opt/chi-in-a-box/venv/bin/activate
       source /opt/site-config/admin-openrc.sh
       openstack <put command here>