01 Infra Setup

This describes how to prepare each machine before deploying services on them.

First steps

Create an ssh key or pick an existing one. We'll refer to it as the personal_ssh_key.
Deploy ansible on the laptop (Lapy), which will act as the ansible control node. To do so:
- Create a venv: python3 -m venv venv
- Activate it: source venv/bin/activate
- Install the listed ansible requirements with pip install -r requirements.txt
Keep in mind you should activate this venv from now on when running ansible commands.

Some services are designed to be accessible through WAN through a friendly URL.
You'll need to have a domain where you can set DNS records and have the ability to create different subdomains, as the guide assumes each service will get its own subdomain.
Getting and configuring the domain is outside the scope of this repo. Whenever a service needs you to set up a subdomain, it will be mentioned explictly.
You should add the domain to the var root_domain in ansible/infra_vars.yml.

The guide is agnostic to which provider you pick, but has been tested with VMs from https://99stack.com and contains some operations that are specifically relevant to their VPSs.
The expectations are that the VPS ticks the following boxes:
- Runs Debian 12 bookworm.
- Has a public IP4 and starts out with SSH listening on port 22.
- Boots with one of your SSH keys already authorized. If this is not the case, you'll have to manually drop the pubkey there before using the playbooks.
Move on once your VPS is running and satisfies the prerequisites.

You have an example ansible/example.inventory.ini. Copy it with cp ansible/example.inventory.ini ansible/inventory.ini and fill in with the values for your VPS.
A few notes:
- The guides assume you'll only have one VPS in the [Vipy] group. Stuff will break if you have multiple, so avoid that.

Ansible will create a user on the first playbook 01_basic_vps_setup_playbook.yml. This is the user that will get used regularly. But, since this user doesn't exist, you obviosuly need to first run this playbook from some other user. We assume your VPS provider has given you a root user, which is what you need to define as the running user in the next command.
cd into ansible
Run ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini infra/01_user_and_access_setup_playbook.yml -e 'ansible_user="your root user here"'
Then, configure firewall access, fail2ban and auditd with ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini infra/02_firewall_and_fail2ban_playbook.yml. Since the user we will use is now present, there is no need to specify the user anymore.

Note that, by applying this playbooks, both the root user and the counterweight user will use the same SSH pubkey for auth.