“Biting off more than I can chew.”

As of Sunday, I had gotten droplet creation, volume storage, and a good bit of the base OS setup work handled. The major missing piece was the creating the database. I am happy to say that work is now complete, but it’s not without bumps, warts, and bruises.

Creating the database server proved daunting because Ansible modules do not exist for DigitalOcean’s managed database server. I thought I’d just write a module or two, however that proved to be a much more daunting task than I first realized.

I’ve never written a module for Ansible, I’m no DBA, and the number of APIs exposed for database actions left me feeling deflated. Still, I soldiered through and created a Python script I can use to create, configure, or destroy a managed MySQL server. There are a ton of assumptions made to keep the scope of work reduced, but it’s sufficient for my needs at this point. It’s wrapped with argparse so I can run it from an Ansible command task then parse the JSON output.

Check it out here: https://github.com/seaburr/WordPressOnDigitalOcean/blob/master/roles/database-server/files/digital_ocean_database.py

As I said, I believe Ansible modules should exist for their managed database, as they do for AWS and GCP however, I think that’s a larger project than one individual can tackle on their first attempt writing modules. I’d be happy to collaborate on that if it ever comes up.

In related news, I’ve also extended the install-wordpress role to create a wp-config.php from template, including fetching unique salts from wordpress.org, I’ve also fixed a few small issues with the Apache installation and added missing packages.

At this point, the only thing missing to go from nothing to a functioning WordPress site is adding database connection information into wp-config.php and handling SSL.