Ansible playbook for deploying a Commercio Network node

The playbook configures a server to be a Commercio Network full node and installs a script that detects whether the node is losing blocks. If the node loses blocks, a message will be forwarded to a slack channel of your choice.

Prerequisites

The prerequisites to use this playbook are:

• Have a server on which to install the node
• Have python3 installed (version >= 3.5)
  • To check the version:

    python3 -V

• Have ansible installed (version >= core 2.9)
  • To check the version:

    ansible --version

Usage

To use the playbook you need to proceed as follows:

1. Create and add the hosts.ini file to the root directory of this repository and configure it with your target hosts where you want to install your full node. See the Example hosts file.

2. Based on the variables listed in the file all located in main/group_vars path, you can change the behavior of the playbook.

   Default values are set for certain variables, if you want to assign different values for these variables, you can Copy the variable list all.template to the file all and customize your variables.

   Below is the table of all the variables and their meaning:

   Variable name	Usage
   chain_id	Blockchain chain-id (e.g: chain-id for mainnet: commercio-3 , chain-id for testnet: commercio-testnet11k)
   comm_user	Name of the user that will be created and used by the node service.
   moniker	Name of the node
   sync_type	Determines how database synchronization occurs. Options:
   	• pull: Synchronization occurs by doing an rsync from the new node to the node from which it synchronizes.
   	• push: Synchronization occurs by doing an rsync from the node from which you synchronize to the new node.
   	• dump: Synchronization occurs by dumping the dump to disk and unpacking it.
   	• statesync: Synchronization occurs via statesync.
   	• none: Synchronization occurs normally.
   sync_node	Node IP to sync from in case of sync_type = push or pull
   sync_node_home_folder	Node home folder to sync from in case of sync_type = push or pull
   custom_bin_version	Version of the Commercionetworkd binary to use.
   custom_genesis	Genesis file URL
   custom_comm_repo	Path and name of where the Commercio.network binary repository is downloaded
   custom_home_folder	Home where the .commercionetwork folder is installed
   custom_go_path	Path of installed go
   custom_cosmovisor_version	Version of Cosmovisor to install
   custom_trust_rpc1	First RPC to sync from in case of sync_type = statesync sync_type = statesync.
   custom_trust_rpc2	Second RPC to sync from in case of sync_type = statesync sync_type = statesync.
   external_drive	Optional parameter to specify the path if the node database should be installed on an external disk
   slack_hook	Webhook where to send reports about a node losing blocks. No script will be installed if a webhook isn't set
   ANSIBLE_HOST_KEY_CHECKING	Set the variable to False to disbale ssh prompt for host key checks (skip the fingerprint)

• If you want to use a specific cosmovisor version , you can run the following command to list all the cosmovisor versions:

  git -c 'versionsort.suffix=-' ls-remote --tags --sort='v:refname' https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk.git | grep "cosmovisor" | fgrep -v '{}'

2. Run the playbook from the root folder of this repo.:

   ansible-playbook -i hosts.ini main/commercio.yml

Manual installation of the test height script

If you don't choose to install the test height script via the playbook you can install it manually, here's how:

1. Copy the script from main/post_install/tasks/test_height.sh on the server
2. Replace the {{ slack_hook }} variable in the file with your own slack webhook
3. Add the script to a crontab using the crontab -e command. We suggest running the script every 5 minutes

Troubleshooting

There may be errors when launching the playbook. These are the most common:

1. During the install_binary : Run 'make' on target step there may be a possible failure in compiling the binary due to the TestProcessTestSuite test not passing. The playbook will ignore the error and continue execution. The binary still compiles and will work fine.

2. During the setup_configuration : Download genesis file step, a possible failure in the genesis download may occur. This error is caused by Github not responding to the request correctly. In this case the playbook will stop. This error rarely occurs and it will be enough to restart the playbook to complete the configuration.