Stake Wars III

This is a repository containing scripts and automation for NEAR StakeWars part3:

https://near.org/stakewars/

You can find the whole deployment guide at my blog:

https://blog.gritsly.link/stake-wars-challenge-005/

Content:

• Terraform : defined three resources - two main nodes and one monitoring node using Hetzner cloud

• Ansible: defined multiple playbooks:

  • setup_user.yml - connects to root and sets up non-root sudo user on all servers
  • setup_node.yml - deploys all required packages and configurations for running the node including prometheus exporter. User then must do the near-cli parts manually (login, create pool, etc.)
  • setup_monit.yml - deploys prometheus and grafana on monit node.
  • configure_postfix.yml - configures postfix for use with amazon SES service for sending emails.
  • generate_keys.yml - generates validator_key.json and node_key.json for active and backup nodes and syncs all to both
  • start_active_node.yml - starts validating on node defined in ansible inventory as "active"
  • stop_backup_node.yml - stops validating on node defined in ansible inventory as "backup"
  • hardfork.yml - redownloads nearcore, genesis etc. Automates hard fork of shardnet
  • newbinary.yml - only recompiles nearcore to new commit and backs up old version

  Disclaimer! If you want to make a failover then the right order of running operations is:

  1. Switch nodes in ansible inventory
  2. Run stop_backup_node.yml
  3. Run start_active_node.yml
  4. Manually start neard service on backup node (after checking if everything went well)

How-To:

1. Create a Hetzner account, generate an API key through cloud panel.
2. Create a 'terraform.tfvars' file with the API key and hostname (it will be used for PTR record):

hcloud_token = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

3. Run Terraform
4. Populate ansible/hosts file with your variables
5. Run ansible playbooks:

ansible-playbook -i hosts setup_user.yml
ansible-playbook -i hosts setup_node.yml --ask-become-pass
ansible-playbook -i hosts setup_monit.yml --ask-become-pass
ansible-playbook -i hosts configure_postfix.yml --ask-become-pass    #optional
ansible-playbook -i hosts generate_keys.yml --ask-become-pass

6. Proceed to initialize stake pool etc.
7. Run another playbook:

ansible-playbook -i hosts start_active_node.yml --ask-become-pass

8. Check up on your node - journalctl, email sending, set up grafana dashboards etc.