Interestingly, no one has reported this failure before #662 (Github
Issue).
It doesn't make sense to keep saying that we support such old Ansible
versions, when we're not even testing on anything close to those.
Time is also passing and such versions are getting more and more
ancient. It's time we bumped our requirements to something that is more
likely to work.
Fixes#129 (Github Issue).
Unfortunately, we rely on `service_facts`, which is only available
in Ansible >= 2.5.
There's little reason to stick to an old version such as Ansible 2.4:
- some time has passed since we've raised version requirements - it's
time to move into the future (a little bit)
- we've recently (in 82b4640072) improved the way one can run
Ansible in a Docker container
From now on, Ansible >= 2.5 is required.
With this change, the following roles are now only dependent
on the minimal `matrix-base` role:
- `matrix-corporal`
- `matrix-coturn`
- `matrix-mailer`
- `matrix-mxisd`
- `matrix-postgres`
- `matrix-riot-web`
- `matrix-synapse`
The `matrix-nginx-proxy` role still does too much and remains
dependent on the others.
Wiring up the various (now-independent) roles happens
via a glue variables file (`group_vars/matrix-servers`).
It's triggered for all hosts in the `matrix-servers` group.
According to Ansible's rules of priority, we have the following
chain of inclusion/overriding now:
- role defaults (mostly empty or good for independent usage)
- playbook glue variables (`group_vars/matrix-servers`)
- inventory host variables (`inventory/host_vars/matrix.<your-domain>`)
All roles default to enabling their main component
(e.g. `matrix_mxisd_enabled: true`, `matrix_riot_web_enabled: true`).
Reasoning: if a role is included in a playbook (especially separately,
in another playbook), it should "work" by default.
Our playbook disables some of those if they are not generally useful
(e.g. `matrix_corporal_enabled: false`).
As suggested in #63 (Github issue), splitting the
playbook's logic into multiple roles will be beneficial for
maintainability.
This patch realizes this split. Still, some components
affect others, so the roles are not really independent of one
another. For example:
- disabling mxisd (`matrix_mxisd_enabled: false`), causes Synapse
and riot-web to reconfigure themselves with other (public)
Identity servers.
- enabling matrix-corporal (`matrix_corporal_enabled: true`) affects
how reverse-proxying (by `matrix-nginx-proxy`) is done, in order to
put matrix-corporal's gateway server in front of Synapse
We may be able to move away from such dependencies in the future,
at the expense of a more complicated manual configuration, but
it's probably not worth sacrificing the convenience we have now.
As part of this work, the way we do "start components" has been
redone now to use a loop, as suggested in #65 (Github issue).
This should make restarting faster and more reliable.
After having multiple people report issues with retrieving
SSL certificates, we've finally discovered the culprit to be
Ansible 2.5.1 (default and latest version on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS).
As silly as it is, certain distributions ("LTS" even) are 13 bugfix
versions of Ansible behind.
From now on, we try to auto-detect buggy Ansible versions and tell the
user. We also provide some tips for how to upgrade Ansible or
run it from inside a Docker container.
My testing shows that Ansible 2.4.0 and 2.4.6 are OK.
All other intermediate 2.4.x versions haven't been tested, but we
trust they're OK too.
From the 2.5.x releases, only 2.5.0 and 2.5.1 seem to be affected.
Ansible 2.5.2 corrects the problem with `include_tasks` + `with_items`.
If uppercase is used, certain tools (like certbot) would cause trouble.
They would retrieve a certificate for the lowercased domain name,
but we'd try to use it from an uppercase-named directory, which will
fail.
Besides certbot, we may experience other trouble too.
(it hasn't been investigated how far the breakage goes).
To fix it all, we lowercase `host_specific_hostname_identity` by default,
which takes care of the general use-case (people only setting that
and relying on us to build the other domain names - `hostname_matrix`
and `hostname_riot`).
For others, who decide to override these other variables directly
(and who may work around us and introduce uppercase there directly),
we also have the sanity-check tool warn if uppercase is detected
in any of the final domains.
Michael Collins
Aaron Raimist
Slavi Pantaleev
Christian Wolf
Horvath Gergely