Technically speaking this is just me playing around with terraform and ansible as I need to learn it for work. I have used it before work, but not enough to be comfortable with it.

This project will allow you to spin up a Bookstack instance for around $3 per month, but google will shutdown the vm instance randomly as it is preemtible. You can just write a healthcheck script for that.

• Terraform on your computer
• ansible on your computer
• ability to read my jumbled mess

How to install Terraform

How to install Ansible

If my instructions are really that bad, you can find a youtube video.

Clone this to your computer

git clone https://github.com/userbradley/bookstack-ansible.git 

You dont need to use terraform for this. You can just create a digital ocean droplet, a linode vm, a we definitely wont spy on your data vm on tencent cloud, or alibaba cloud if you fancy sharing your KB articles with china. Your choice. If you chose not to use terraform, skip to How to Ansible this

Now that you have this downloaded, you will want to create a GCP account. Just go to cloud.google.com and sign up. You should be able to get a free tier. It usually lasts a year of to $300, which ever comes first.

Once there, you will need to create a service account by clicking the 3 lines at the top left, scroll down to Iam & admin then click service accounts. Click Create Service account at the top of the page, and name it something like terraform-service-account and click create Here you will need to select a role and please pick compute admin then click continue followed by done

Click your service account and scroll down to where you see keys on the page. Click ADD KEY and select json Download the file to the terraform folder of the repo you cloned earlier and edit the file called provider.tf and put the file name where you see it asking for it.

Copy your id_rsa.pub file to the terraform directory

cp ~/.ssh/id_rsap.pub bookstack-ansible/terraform/id_rsa.pub

In the main.tf file, scroll down to the bottm and replace username with your username from the SSH key.

Open a shell window and type terraform init this should download the google dependencies needed to create vm's on GCP. Once that's done, you will need to run

terraform apply

If you're lazy (like me) and dont want to type yes

echo "yes" | terraform apply

It will spin up an ubuntu VM in us-central1-c if memory serves correctly.

if you want to spin one up closer to home, check here where I have a list of regions and their locations. Probably better to use google's official page.

Once Terraform has done it's business and created an instance, grab it's ip address from the google console.

just want to add I am still bad a terraform so i cant quite figure out a way to get the IP address though terraform but when i do you'll see a new update

ssh to the ip address

ssh <ip>

If prompted, type yes.

In google console, create a firewall rule allowing port 80 and 443. Click compute engine from the nav bar, click your instance name, scroll down to networking then click details On the left, clickfirewall and CREATE FIREWALL RULE Name it allow http, targets apply to all and then ip filter is 0.0.0.0/0 and select tcp then type 80,443 and then save

Now that we have the node, we can create the actual fluff.

Change directory to the ansible folder

cd ../ansible

Assuming you were in the terraform folder

Here, we will need to edit the file called hosts

Add the IP address of your google node or what ever node where is asks.

Now we need to edit the file group_vars/booknodes.yml

Here we need to specify a few things:

Example looks like this:

#Database stuff
mysql_root_password: "WubbaLubbaDubDub"
mysql_db: "bookstack"
mysql_user: "boockstack"
mysql_password: "HolyguacamoleThisPasswordIsInsecure"

#Setup stuff for bookstack and nginx
url: "bookstack.breadnet.co.uk" 
domain: "breadnet.co.uk" 
bookstack_name: "breadStack"  
protocal: "http"  #http or https

#Bookstack mail specifics
mail_driver: "smtp"  
mail_server: "mail.bread"  
mail_port: "25"  
mail_username: ""  
mail_password: ""  

I will also add that if your mail server is the local host.. put localhost

Now that that's all good, we can run the script. In the ansible folder run

ansible-playbook -l bookstack -i hosts -u <server login username> bookstack.yml

Where -l is the host name under the hosts file, -i tells ansible what inventory file to use and -u tells ansible what user to login as then finally bookstack.yml is the playbook to run.

Once it's done, you will need to add a DNS record pointing to the GCP compute node and then open http:// and login with [email protected] and the password being password

Please make a pull request if anything is messed up, or open an issue if you need help.

• Add ability to use nginx basic auth
• Add ability to run certbot to get free LE certificate
• Add ability to create UFW rules
• Create monitor script to restart the node if it goes down
• Add a backup script that dumps the database as a cronjob
• Learn to write choerent sentences