This playbook will deploy 3 nodes, running in docker, on a remote host after pulling the latest parity-ethereum source from gitlab and building a new image on top of rust:1.29.1-slim-stretch.

Tested on a fresh Google Cloud debian stretch box with Ansible 2.6.5.

Only requirements are debian, having your pubkey on the system, allowing ssh traffic, and creating an ingress firewall rule for port 3001 (for the ethstats dashboard). Ansible hosts file uses this group.

# /etc/ansible/hosts
[GCEtest]

You can run the playbook like this: ansible-playbook site.yml -f 10 -u <remote user>

It comprises of two roles, "common" and "authority". The common role takes care of docker/other packages installation and the authority role handles the setup of the authority network. After the playbook runs, the ethstats dashboard should be accessible at your.ip:3001. This is admittedly of limited use for a PoA network, but there's a recent fork of the project that has PoA features on its roadmap, so that's something to keep an eye on.

Note: it is recommended to change the ownership of the /code directory created in roles/common/main.yml to something other than root.

Inexhaustive List of Future TODO:

• trigger new docker build on code change
• support other distributions besides debian
• run as parity user rather than root inside container
• avoid using --unsafe-expose
• create more PoA-specific monitoring
• improve and flesh out the configuration structure
• use templates for parity configuration
• use var files for simple ansible configuration
• add dynamic node names
• bootstrap parity nodes in a more configurable, native way