🦅Deploy a Hugin Full Node with Docker

This tutorial will guide you through the process of deploying a "Hugin Full Node", that is, a publically available Kryptokrona node bundled with Hugin API for extra functionality

Setup

Let’s head over to the repository https://github.com/kryptokrona/kryptokrona and download a latest release: https://github.com/kryptokrona/kryptokrona/releases

Unzip the directory to a directory such as ~/Projects then use the terminal to navigate to the directory of kryptokrona-<version>.

Installation

First install Ansible locally.

Mac using brew package manager:

• brew install ansible

• brew install esolitos/ipa/sshpass

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt update
sudo apt install software-properties-common python3-jmespath
sudo add-apt-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible
sudo apt install sshpass

Windows using WSL

Since Ansible can not run natively on Windows we need to use the subsystem for Linux in Windows. Please check out this tutorial on how to get it started: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/windows_faq.html#windows-faq-ansible

Verify

Then we need to run the following to verify that our installation was successful:

ansible --version

Configuration

So now that we have Ansible up and running on our OS we will start looking into what kind of configuration we need to do in order for us to provision our VPS with Kryptokrona.

If you have never heard what provisioning are it simply means “providing” or making something available. What Ansible does is to setup Infrastructure as Code (IaC) that we define what we need to install and what needs to be configured in code and thus we do not need to manually set this up and do this everytime we make a change or add something new. It does everything for us in one command when running it. This can be a huge time and energy saver. If something would have happen of a server or infrastructure we could just spin up a new environment very easily.

So let’s start by going into the ansible directory and open up the prod.inventory file (you can of course use your favorite text editor instead of Vim):

[vps]
<ip address/hostname here>

Now we see a block of [vps] and under it are the domain name followed by the letsencrypt_email, domain_name on the same row. This is all the hosts we are going to use. In this case we are just going to provision to one VPS. You could put the IP address there instead of n1.vxo.nu and remove additional lines if you don't use multiple VPS instances.

If we would like to provision to two or multiple VPS we could just copy the first one and change the ip/hostname and Ansible would pick them all up and setup everything on those VPS as well.

So change n1.xkr.nu to your ip/hostname and the letencrypt_email and the domain_name and remove the second line n2.xkr.nu.

Please bare in mind that fix the DNS settings first for this domain name and point to the VPS IP address a couple of hours before running this otherwise the certificate would not go through if it can not find that the DNS points to that domain name.

Also update exporter_version to the latest release over at https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/

So now save the file and we will start looking at provision_vps.yml file.

Ansible Vault

Before we start with the provisioning we need to edit the file in ansible/group_vars/vps.yml with your config. This information will be encrypted later. Leave out the alert configs according to the comments if you don't want to have the alert system in place.

Then we need to encrypt the file:

• ansible-vault encrypt ./group_vars/vps.yml

Then save and put a password that you NEED to remember.

Then we need to use that password we set for the file itself and save that in a file on our host system. Do that by:

• vim ~/kryptokrona.pwd

Then add that same password inside this file that we set for the vps.yml file and we will use this file to run the playbook.

Then save and exit:

• :wq

Then open up the file ansible.sh and edit it and edit the line ssh-copy-id with your [e-mail] and add an additional line with the second or more VPS instances. Just remember that we need to be ROOT to be able to run this. So don't use another user.

So now we can start provisioning by running our shell script:

• sudo chmod +x ansible.sh

• ./ansible.sh

Common issues

NGINX configuration breaks

Problem: If you made some change in NGINX configuration and it breaks during setup, the next time it will not always be able to update it so it works again. Solution: SSH into the machine and change the configuration manually and restart the NGINX server. Check the logs with journalctl -xe if you don't find the issue right away.