Overview

The xlsform server runs http://xlsform.opendatakit.org. This repo describes how to setup that machine.

1. Provision a remote machine

We currently use a small (512MB, 20GB) box running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Digital Ocean. We connect via SSH on port 22 with a private key. Passwords are disabled for remote root login.

You will need to create a user called ubuntu for Ansible to use. To ensure the ubuntu user can run passwordless sudo, run sudo visudo and confirm these lines below are present, in this order, and are not commented out on the remote machine.

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
ubuntu  ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
admin   ALL=(ALL) ALL

You'll also need to setup create a RSA key pair on the remote machine. Once you do:

1. Copy the ~/.ssh/id_rsa file to xlsform-server/secrets/id_rsa on the local machine.
2. Add id_rsa.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote machine.

2. Install software on your local machine

1. Install ansible v2.2.0 or later.

3. Run ansible to configure remote machine

1. Clone or download this repo.
2. Read over playbook.yml and the files in roles/ to understand behavior.
3. Ensure the correct IP to the machine is in hosts file.
4. Ensure id_rsa is in secrets/.
5. In xlsform-server/, run ansible-playbook -i provisioning/hosts provisioning/playbook.yml.

Notes

You may wish to configure ansible to disable host checking and disable retry files.