Building servers can be hard, but from a system administrator’s point of view, WordPress servers are relatively easy to configure. AnsiPress aims to introduce some basic Devops knowledge to WordPress developers, and along the way, help them to automate server management.

Read this article for a short introduction to Ansible.

First you need to have Ansible installed. It’s written in Python (which most operating systems already have), so let’s first install Python’s most popular package manager - pip:

$ sudo easy_install pip

With pip installed, we can now use it to install Ansible:

$ sudo pip install ansible

You might want to try and update Ansible at this (optional) step:

$ sudo pip install --upgrade ansible

To verify it’s installed properly, run:

$ ansible --version
ansible 1.9.0.1

There are two main playbooks: setup.yml and first_run.yml. The latter should only be ran once (but you can repeat it, of course, it just won’t have any effect, all of the tasks will be skipped). It’s purpose is to create a separate (non-root) user which will be used to login.

setup.yml holds all the necessary roles to set up the server.

Before you can run it, you need to copy group_vars/example.yml: Create a production.yml in the same directory and paste the contents of the example.yml in then modify them to your liking.

Also, edit inventories/production and set the ip to point at your (empty) server.

To run the first_run.yml, enter the following command (-k asks for SSH password):

$ ansible-playbook first_run.yml -i inventories/production -k

Then run the setup.yml by entering (-K asks for SUDO password):

$ ansible-playbook setup.yml -i inventories/production -K

The goal of this project is to gather as much knowledge from the community as possible in order to end up with a script that’ll build the most optimal WordPress server setup with a single command.

Fork it, fix it, create a pull request.

AnsiPress is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 2.