Installing and getting started with Rundeck

Server Installation

I tested this out on a RHEL. Other meathods are available @http://rundeck.org/2.8.4/administration/installation.html

rpm -Uvh http://repo.rundeck.org/latest.rpm
yum install rundeck
service rundeckd start

or get the binary from https://bintray.com/rundeck/rundeck-rpm and then do a yum install

At this time rundeck should be running at http://SERVERNAME:4440/menu/home

Thats it, Login to dashboard using admin/admin

Start/Stop/Restart

service rundeckd start
service rundeckd stop
service rundeckd restart

Issues after installation

After initial installtion, I noticed that rundeck still defaults to localhost few times, it that happens, apply this fix

Update /etc/rundeck/rundeck-config.properties and /etc/rundeck/framework.properties to replace "localhost" to actual hostname. Also in /etc/rundeck/rundeck-config.properties, change "grails.serverURL=http://localhost:4440"

This is how they should look like after making the change

framework.properties

framework.server.name = SERVERNAME
framework.server.hostname = SERVERNAME
framework.server.url = http://SERVERNAME:4440

rundeck-config.properties

grails.serverURL=http://SERVERNAME:4440

After this restart the services. Note that I had to kill -9 the services for this to take effect

rundeck cli installtion

Sometimes you would wanna use rundeck commandline for most common of tasks. For this do a yum install as below

yum install rundeck-cli.noarch

and add following to ~/.bash_profile (if the installation was done as root, make sure to switch to rundeck at this time)

export RD_URL=http://SERVERNAME:4440
export RD_USER=admin
export RD_PASSWORD=admin

Finally source your profile

. ~/.bash_profile

Common Configurations

**Any configurations from here onwards should be done using rundeck user unless explicitly specified.

Create Project

su - rundeck
rd projects create -p utopia

Defining Nodes :

create following file /var/rundeck/projects/utopia/nodes/resources.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
  <node name="web01" description="web01" tags="web"
    hostname="utopia1.lets.try.com" username="testusr"
    osFamily="unix" osName="Linux">
    <attribute name="proxy" value="utopia-qa.lets.try.com"/>
  </node>
  <node name="db01" description="db01" tags="db"
    hostname="utopia2.lets.try.com" username="testusr"
    osFamily="unix" osName="Linux">
    <attribute name="proxy" value="utopia-qa.lets.try.com"/>
  </node>
</project>

Defining model :

Now that nodes are defined, we need to make rundeck aware of what new hosts are there, define the model

open /var/rundeck/projects/utopia/etc/project.properties and add following two lines to end of that file :

 resources.source.2.config.directory=/var/rundeck/projects/utopia/nodes
 resources.source.2.type=directory

This way we define a new resource source for rundeck to look from

Using rundeck in ssh-password authentication mode

By default Rundeck works with ssh keys, however if you wish to use password authentication as your preffered way of authentication, you will need to configure rundeck to do so. To achive this, a couple of configurations have to be made :

- Enable SSH Password Authentication at either global, project or node level
- Upload password as a key to rundeck

Enabling SSH Password Authentication at rundeck global level

**If the rundeck installation was done using root, this step should be executed using root

Add follwoing line to /etc/rundeck/framework.properties to enable password authentication by default

framework.ssh-authentication=password

If you wish to keep this setting at project level, update project.properties using the below settings

project.ssh-authentication=password

Adding password key to rundeck

Goto Settings (top right) --> Key Storage --> Add or Upload a Key Select Key Type as Password, enter password as text, put Storage path appropriately, assign a name and click save

Next add following line to project.properties :

project.ssh-password-storage-path=keys/utopia/rundeck.passwd