Quick Start Guide

This guide is intended to quickly march you through the steps of installing and running stackd.io and its dependencies. We’re not intending to be complete or provide you with everything needed for a production-ready install, we may make some assumptions you don’t agree with, and there may be things we missed. If you feel anything is out of the ordinary, a bit confusing, or just plain missing, please contact us.

Amazon AMI

We know that reading through a big, messy guide like this one and executing each and every command will be time consuming and error prone. If you would rather just run a script to do a lot of this for you, we have a script to build an AMI for you. Keep in mind that the script is somewhat opinionated and won’t let you make many decisions (you’re free to modify it to suit your needs though!) Here’s a list of things it will do:

• Install all of the necessary stuff (MySQL, python, virtualenv, tons of packages, etc)
• Create a stackdio virtualenv at /usr/share/stackdio
• Install stackdio and its python dependencies
• Install and configure Nginx
• Install and configure supervisord to run gunicorn, celery, and salt-master
• Create an admin user

For more information, check out the AMI guide: Using the Amazon AMI

MySQL

We’re using stackd.io internally with MySQL. Since stackd.io is using Django, it inherently supports many different database servers, so if you need something different feel free, but you’re on your own for its install. Be sure to plug in the correct settings later when configuring stackd.io with different servers. For more information on Django’s database support, see: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/ref/databases/

Python virtual environments

It’s highly recommend to install stackd.io into a Python virtualenv, and we recommend using virtualenv wrapper.

stackdio user and sudo access

Some of the coming steps in the Quick Start Guide require sudo/root access, but once those are handled, the rest of stackd.io should work with a non-root user. For ease of use, we’re going to create a stackdio user, give sudo access, and use this user for the remainder of this guide.

# Create the user
sudo useradd -m -s/bin/bash -U stackdio

# Give sudo
sudo echo 'stackdio ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/stackdio > /dev/null

# Switch to user...and remain as this user for the rest of the guide
sudo su - stackdio

OS-specific preparation

Warning

You must follow the steps in one of the following prep guides for the OS you’re installing stackd.io in.

Follow one of the individual guides below to prepare your particular environment for stackd.io. Once you finish, come back here and continue on.

• Preparing CentOS for stackd.io installation
• Preparing Ubuntu for stackd.io installation

Installation

Below we’re going to create our virtualenv named stackdio and install it directy from github. You can name your virtualenv whatever you like, but remember to modify the steps accordingly.

Creating the virtualenv

Let’s create a virtualenv to install stackd.io into:

mkvirtualenv stackdio

The virtualenv should automatically activate when you create it. If you exit your current shell and come back later to work on stackdio and find things not working as expected you probably need to activate the virtualenv again. To do this, virtualenvwrapper gives you the workon command:

workon stackdio

Install bower

In your terminal, run the following command to install bower:

Note

You must have previously installed npm/node from the OS specific preparation

sudo npm install -g bower

Install the stackd.io project

Note

Double-check that your virtualenv is activated or else this will probably complain that you don’t have permissions to install (because it’s trying to install into the global python site-packages directory which we don’t want!)

There’s two options for installing here. We recommend pulling the latest version from our releases page, like this:

workon stackdio  # Activate the virtualenv
pip install https://github.com/stackdio/stackdio/releases/download/0.7.0a4/stackdio_server-0.7.0a4-py2-none-any.whl

If you’d rather have the most up to date code, you can install from our repository instead:

workon stackdio  # Activate the virtualenv
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/stackdio/stackdio.git
cd stackdio
bower install
pip install -e .[production]

# For mysql only
pip install -e .[mysql]

Configuration

After the install, you’ll have a stackdio command available to interact with much of the platform. First off, we need to configure stackd.io a bit. The stackdio init command will prompt you for several pieces of information. If you followed all steps above verbatim, then all defaults may be accepted, but if you deviated from the path you will need to provide the following information:

• an existing user on the system that will run everything (it will default to the stackdio user)
• an existing location where stackd.io can store its data (the default is $HOME/.stackdio/storage and will be created for you if permissions allow)
• a database DSN that points to a running database you have access to (if you’re using the MySQL install from above, the default mysql://stackdio:password@localhost:3306/stackdio is appropriate)

stackdio init

Now, let’s populate are database with a schema:

stackdio manage.py migrate

IF you installed from our github repository, you’ll need to build the minified javascript files:

# ONLY DO THIS IF YOU INSTALLED FROM THE GITHUB REPOSITORY.
stackdio manage.py build_ui

stackd.io users

LDAP

stackd.io can easily integrate with an LDAP server. See our LDAP Guide for more information on configuring stackd.io to work with LDAP. If you choose to go the LDAP route, you can skip this entire section because users who successfully authenticate and are members of the right groups via LDAP will automatically be created in stackd.io.

Non-LDAP admin user

Admin users in stackd.io have less restriction to various pieces of the platform. For example, only admin users are allowed to create and modify cloud providers and profiles that other users can use to spin up their stacks.

Note

You will need at least one admin user to configure some key areas of the system.

stackdio manage.py createsuperuser

# and follow prompts...

Non-LDAP regular users

When not using LDAP, the easiest way to create new non-admin users is to use the built-in Django admin interface. First we need the server to be up and running so keep following the steps below and we’ll come back to adding users later.

Web server configuration

For the quickstart, we’ll use the stackdio command to generate the necessary configuration for Nginx to serve our static content as well as proxying the Python app through gunicorn.

To configure Nginx for CentOS:

# CENTOS

# add execute permissions to the user's home directory for static content to serve correctly
chmod +x ~/

stackdio config nginx | sudo tee /etc/nginx/conf.d/stackdio.conf > /dev/null

# rename the default server configuration
sudo mv /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.bak

To configure Nginx for Ubuntu:

# UBUNTU ONLY
stackdio config nginx | sudo tee /etc/nginx/sites-available/stackdio > /dev/null
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/stackdio /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

# remove the default configuration symlink
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

After this, generate the static content we’ll need to serve:

stackdio manage.py collectstatic --noinput

and finally, start Nginx:

sudo service nginx restart

RabbitMQ, celery, and salt

Start the rabbitmq server:

sudo service rabbitmq-server start

For celery and salt-master, we’ll be using supervisord. The required packages should already be installed, so we’ll just need to configure supervisor and start the services.

# generate supervisord configuration that controls gunicorn, celery, and salt-master and store it in the .stackdio directory.
stackdio config supervisord > ~/.stackdio/supervisord.conf

# launch supervisord and start the services
supervisord -c ~/.stackdio/supervisord.conf
supervisorctl -c ~/.stackdio/supervisord.conf start all

Try it out!

At this point, you should have everything configured and running, so fire up a web browser and point it to your hostname and you should see the stackd.io login page. If you’re using LDAP, try logging in with a user that is a member of the stackdio-admin and stackdio-user groups, or login with the admin user you created earlier.

Creating additional users

Note

If you’re using LDAP, you can skip this step.

The superuser we created earlier will give us admin access to stackd.io, however, you probably want at least one non-superuser. Point your browser to http://hostname:8000/__private/admin and use the username and password for the super user you created earlier. You should be presented with the Django admin interface. To create additional users, follow the steps below.

• click Users
• click Add user in the top right of the page
• set the username and password of the user and click save
• optionally provide first name, last name, and email address of the user and click save

The newly created users will now have access to stackd.io. Test this by logging out and signing in with one of the non-admin users.