shahkamran / ansible-lamp-wordpress

Set up Wordpress Multisite Network with LAMP Stack using Ansible on Ubnutu servers.

Provision Wordpress Multisite (Network) with LAMP stack using Ansible Playbook (on Ubuntu)

This playbook will install a WordPress multisite network site along with LAMP stack including Apache, MySQL & PHP on a Ubuntu instance. Based on options set in the group_vars/all variable file, it will also create a virtualhost on the server when you run it for the first time. You can run this again and it will re-apply only missing components or some settings such as permissions.

This Ansible playbook has been tested on destination hosts running following Linux distributions but can be easily adopted for other Linux distributions.

• Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS

1. Setting up your environment (Pre-requisites)

Ansible environment installed and working on your computer or control machine

Ansible heavily depends on Python and will require Python and associated dependencies. On your client you can run following commands to install dependencies, for example.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3 python3-setuptools python3-pip ansible -y
#easy_install pip
#pip3 install ansible

Set up Systems Inventory and Access

• Move templates/.ssh/config file to your ~/.ssh/config.
• Update inventory.ini file with hosts IDs matching with config file above.
• Configure ssh key access to all target systems so that ssh works without any password from a trusted computer.
• The account set up in config file and used for connectivity to hosts should have sudo access and should be set up with passwordless sudo. If the sudo commands ask for password for the user you can amend sudo configuration by running sudo visudo and modifying #%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL to %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL on all destination hosts.
• Install Python3 on all target systems.

ansible hosts -b -m raw -a "apt update && apt install python3 -y" -i inventory.ini

Settings

• php_modules: An array containing PHP extensions that should be installed to support your WordPress setup. You don't need to change this variable, but you might want to include new extensions to the list if your specific setup requires it.
• mysql_root_password: The desired password for the root MySQL account.
• mysql_db: The name of the MySQL database that should be created for WordPress.
• mysql_user: The name of the MySQL user that should be created for WordPress.
• mysql_password: The password for the new MySQL user.
• http_host: Your domain name.
• http_conf: The name of the configuration file that will be created within Apache.
• http_port: HTTP port for this virtual host, where 80 is the default.

3. Obtain the playbook

git clone https://github.com/shahkamran/ansible-lamp-wordpress.git

4. Customise Options

vi group_vars/all

---
#System Settings
php_modules: [ 'php-curl', 'php-gd', 'php-mbstring', 'php-xml', 'php-xmlrpc', 'php-soap', 'php-intl', 'php-zip' ]

#MySQL Settings
mysql_root_password: "mysql_rOOt_password"
mysql_db: "wordpress"
mysql_user: "user_name"
mysql_password: "secret_passw0rd"

#HTTP Settings
http_host: "example.com"
http_conf: "example.com.conf"
http_port: "80"
https_port: "443"

• If you are running the playbook again and wish to run a specific section, you can comment out the roles that you do not want to run in the main.yml file in the root folder of this repository.

5. Run the Playbook

ansible-playbook -l [target] -i [inventory file] -u [remote user] main.yml

• [target] = Host name or id from the list hosts defined in inventory file
• [inventory file] = This is the inventory.ini file with list of your hosts which have access configured in ~/.ssh/config file.
• [remote user] = Name of user to run the playbook as.

• For example

ansible-playbook -l host-01 -i inventory.ini -u username main.yml

6. Enable Wordpress Multisite Network

• Go to your website and set up Wordpress initial install.
• Go to Tools - Network Setup (http://example.com/wp-admin/network.php)
• Select one of the two methods and run Install
• Follow the instructions to add additional definitions to /var/www/example.com/wordpress/wp-config.php and /var/www/example.com/wordpress/.htaccess files.
• Restart Apache (service apache2 restart).
• Log in to your site again and look for Network Admin under My Sites located in the top menu.

7. Troubleshooting

• If you see the error below, you do not have Python installed on the remote system. fatal: [host-01]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "module_stderr": "Shared connection to <target> closed.\r\n", "module_stdout": "/bin/sh: 1: /usr/bin/python: not found\r\n", "msg": "MODULE FAILURE", "rc": 127}

8. Disclaimer

• Do not apply to a production environment without testing and understanding exactly how this repository and playbooks work.

You should now be up and running. Well done!