Install Ansible & Playbook Requirements

You need to install Ansible on your computer, you can do this by running the following command:

MacOS/Linux: (using Homebrew)

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew install ansible

Windows: (using Chocolatey) https://chocolatey.org/

choco install ansible

You need to install the requirements for the playbooks to run, you can do this by running the following command:

ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml
ansible-galaxy role install -r requirements.yml

Sign Up For Vultr or any other cloud provider

You need to sign up for a cloud provider, we use Vultr, but you can use any other cloud provider. You need to add your SSH key to the cloud provider, so you can login to the hosts.

Create VPS instances using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, you can get them for as low as $6/mo and you should have at least 3 nodes, in separate regions.

Vultr - Free $100 credit with our link

Configure Ansible Inventory

You need to configure the hosts file to include the hosts you want to provision. An example inventory file is provided in hosts/hosts.yml, name yours 01-vultr.yml, you can add multiple by incrementing the number. We have a hosts/*-*.yml entry in the .gitignore so it won't be committed to the repo.

Use the regional layout as demonstrated in the example file, this will allow you to provision hosts in different regions with the correct settings.

Setup A VPN Network

You need to provision some hosts with the openvpn role. You can do this by running the setup-vpn.yml playbook. This playbook will provision a VPN network to all hosts using the vpn group with the following configuration:

OpenVPN Server
GlusterFS Network shared storage for client configuration files
NTP Server for time synchronization using region pool
Configure UFW firewall to allow OpenVPN traffic and GlusterFS traffic

make setup-vpn

Setup a Lethean Blockchain Explorer

Add your hosts to the hosts/02-explorer.yml file, you can use the same hosts as the VPN network, or different ones use the hosts/explorer.yml file as a template, make sure you make a new file starting with a number so you can pull updates.

This will provision the host with the following:

Nginx Web Server
LetsEncrypt SSL Certificates with automatic renewal
NodeJS + npm
Lethean Blockchain Explorer
UFW Firewall
Postgres Database
adds SWAP
Supervisor to keep the explorer running

 make setup-explorer

Setup a Lethean Blockchain Node

Add your hosts to the hosts/03-node.yml file, you can use the same hosts as the VPN network, or different ones use the hosts/chain.yml file as a template, make sure you make a new file starting with a number so you can pull updates.