Sysadmin guidelines

We've developed a number of general guidelines for best practices over the years in dealing with multiple servers and environments. These guidelines are designed to minimise errors and make any problems easier to diagnose.

No manual configuration

The golden rule! All production servers should start as a fresh Ubuntu image, and should be configured and provisioned via the ofn-install Ansible playbooks. This means we can be sure about the state of each server and minimises any potential issues with conflicting packages or unexpected configuration states.

Deploy releases

When deploying to a server, we always use releases. This versioning means we know exactly what code is on which server. Releases are listed here and you should use the release tag, e.g: v2.1.0. You can specify the release to deploy like so:

ansible-playbook playbooks/deploy.yml --limit uk-prod -e "git_version=v2.1.0"