Wednesday, 31 July 2013

Ansible playbook for BigCouch

Last week, as I was stuck at home looking after my sickly little one (nurseries are wonderful breeding grounds for germs), I decided to kill time by reading about BigCouch, a cluster solution for CouchDB which is just about to be merged into the CouchDB trunk. 

As Ansible is a nice hammer, and BigCouch was decidedly looking like a -clustered- nail, I decided to cook a playbook to install and configure BigCouch. 


As you can see, it is not terribly complicated, and nicely translates the english instructions into actionable code. 

The one thing I don't like about the playbook is the step to configure the cluster itself. It is done via RESTful calls to some BigCouch URLs, and I really ought to check the state of the cluster before modifying it.

For instance, there is no need to add a node to a cluster if it is already there. For the time being, I just ignore the status code coming from the HTTP PUT, but I should really do something more clever, maybe by using CURL to read the status of the cluster before attempting to change it.

I am sure this must be possible with Ansible, but I have not yet figured it out.

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