Until now, we were leaving services "enabled"
(symlinks in /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/).
We clean these up now. Broken symlinks may still exist in older
installations that enabled/disabled services. We're not taking care
to fix these up. It's just a cosmetic defect anyway.
We do this by creating one more layer of indirection.
First we reach some generic vhost handling matrix.DOMAIN.
A bunch of override rules are added there (capturing traffic to send to
ma1sd, etc). nginx-status and similar generic things also live there.
We then proxy to the homeserver on some other vhost (only Synapse being
available right now, but repointing this to Dendrite or other will be
possible in the future).
Then that homeserver-specific vhost does its thing to proxy to the
homeserver. It may or may not use workers, etc.
Without matrix-corporal, the flow is now:
1. matrix.DOMAIN (matrix-nginx-proxy/matrix-domain.conf)
2. matrix-nginx-proxy/matrix-synapse.conf
3. matrix-synapse
With matrix-corporal enabled, it becomes:
1. matrix.DOMAIN (matrix-nginx-proxy/matrix-domain.conf)
2. matrix-corporal
3. matrix-nginx-proxy/matrix-synapse.conf
4. matrix-synapse
(matrix-corporal gets injected at step 2).
We do use some `:latest` images by default for the following services:
- matrix-dimension
- Goofys (in the matrix-synapse role)
- matrix-bridge-appservice-irc
- matrix-bridge-appservice-discord
- matrix-bridge-mautrix-facebook
- matrix-bridge-mautrix-whatsapp
It's terribly unfortunate that those software projects don't release
anything other than `:latest`, but that's how it is for now.
Updating that software requires that users manually do `docker pull`
on the server. The playbook didn't force-repull images that it already
had.
With this patch, it starts doing so. Any image tagged `:latest` will be
force re-pulled by the playbook every time it's executed.
It should be noted that even though we ask the `docker_image` module to
force-pull, it only reports "changed" when it actually pulls something
new. This is nice, because it lets people know exactly when something
gets updated, as opposed to giving the indication that it's always
updating the images (even though it isn't).
In most cases, there's not really a need to touch the system
firewall, as Docker manages iptables by itself
(see https://docs.docker.com/network/iptables/).
All ports exposed by Docker containers are automatically whitelisted
in iptables and wired to the correct container.
This made installing firewalld and whitelisting ports pointless,
as far as this playbook's services are concerned.
People that wish to install firewalld (for other reasons), can do so
manually from now on.
This is inspired by and fixes#97 (Github Issue).
`matrix_nginx_proxy_data_path` has always served as a base path,
so we're renaming it to reflect that.
Along with this, we're also introducing a new "data path" variable
(`matrix_nginx_proxy_data_path`), which is really a data path this time.
It's used for storing additional, non-configuration, files related to
matrix-nginx-proxy.
Certain use-cases may require that people mount additional files
into the matrix-nginx-proxy container. Similarly to how we do it
for Synapse, we are introducing a new variable that makes this
possible (`matrix_nginx_proxy_container_additional_volumes`).
This makes the htpasswd file for Synapse Metrics (introduced in #86,
Github Pull Request) to also perform mounting using this new mechanism.
Hopefully, for such an "extension", keeping htpasswd file-creation and
volume definition in the same place (the tasks file) is better.
All other major volumes' mounting mechanism remains the same (explicit
mounting).
This makes all containers (except mautrix-telegram and
mautrix-whatsapp), start as a non-root user.
We do this, because we don't trust some of the images.
In any case, we'd rather not trust ALL images and avoid giving
`root` access at all. We can't be sure they would drop privileges
or what they might do before they do it.
Because Postfix doesn't support running as non-root,
it had to be replaced by an Exim mail server.
The matrix-nginx-proxy nginx container image is patched up
(by replacing its main configuration) so that it can work as non-root.
It seems like there's no other good image that we can use and that is up-to-date
(https://hub.docker.com/r/nginxinc/nginx-unprivileged is outdated).
Likewise for riot-web (https://hub.docker.com/r/bubuntux/riot-web/),
we patch it up ourselves when starting (replacing the main nginx
configuration).
Ideally, it would be fixed upstream so we can simplify.
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.
