Ansible Playbook to deploy a Debian Server

This playbook was initially created to easily set up a VPN server within minutes. I've added a few more roles to this playbook since then. You can modify your site.yml file and select the roles which suit your needs.

This playbook currently includes the following roles:

• apt: Install core packages
• system-config: Set up core config files in /etc
• networking: Configure systemd-networkd and enabling IP forwarding
• nftables: Set up a basic nftables ruleset and allow other roles to create firewall rules.
• unattended-upgrades: Automate security upgrades
• postfix: Set up a send-only Postfix SMTP server to receive notifications from the server
• openvpn: Set up the OpenVPN server and configure firewall rules
• rsyslog: Set up a remote syslog server
• user-config: Local user configurations. This role has beek kept empty for you to fill it with your user configurations.
• nginx: Setup an HTTPS server block for a given hostname. This role will call the certbot role to generate a TLS cert.
• nginx-base: Setup a default HTTP and HTTPS server using the server's FQDN. This role should NEVER be called. Use the nginx role instead.
• znc: Setup an IRC bounder via ZNC
• wireguard: Setup a WireGuard VPN server
• certbot: Generate a TLS cert for the given hostname. Only uses the DNS-01 challenege for domain verification.
• influxdb: Set up a time series database using InfluxDB
• kapacitor: Set up data processing and alert generation using Kapacitor. Kapacitor gets its data from an InfluxDB server.
• monitor: Set up Telegraf to gather data from a host and send it to an InfluxDB server and set up alerting tasks on a remote Kapacitor server.
• grafana: Set up a Grafana server to create dashboards and view the time series data stored on an InfluxDB server

Before you use this playbook, you'll need to do 2 things

To keep this playbook as generic as possible, I've moved all the variables into a separate file called vars.yml. You will have to create this file by copying vars.sample.yml to vars.yml and adding the required information. You can also encrypt vars.yml using ansible-vault if you so desire.

You will need to add the following files to the OpenVPN role's files directory (roles/openvpn/files). Make sure the files names are the same as given below:

• ca.crt: Your root certificate (CA file)
• crl.pem: Certicate Revocation List
• dh.pem: Diffie Hellman parameters
• server.crt: Your server's certificate (signed by your CA)
• server.key: Your server's private key
• ta.key: OpenVPN static key required for HMAC authentication

All these files can be easily generated using EasyRSA. Check out the Arch Wiki to learn how to use EasyRSA.

1. Make sure your SSH public key has been deployed to the root account as the playbook is using root as the remote_user. If you'd rather SSH into your own account and use sudo to run the playbook, then you'll have to replace remote_user with become_user in site.yml
2. Make sure python-netaddr is installed on your system, as some of the roles in this playbook use the ipaddr filter which needs that package.
3. Edit the inventory (/etc/ansible/hosts or a custom inventory file) to add your Debian server's IP or hostname
4. Change the hosts entry in site.yml to your Debian server's IP or hostname
5. Modify the list of roles provided in site.yml according to your requirements.
6. Run the playbook using ansible-playbook site.yml

To run only a section of the configuration, make use of the --tags flag. Eg:- ansible-playbook site.yml --tags rsyslog