Preparation

1. Populate your inventory

First step is to populate the inventory using the provided .inventory/{1-lxc, 2-services, 3-addons, 4-blockchains} files.
Let’s say you were to put testhost.homelab as follow:
# .inventory/1-lxc
[lxc]
testhost.homelab

# .inventory/2-services
[gitea]
testhost.homelab

# .inventory/3-addons
[ohmyzsh]
testhost.homelab

This means that testhost.homelab can be auto-deployed as an lxc on proxmox, will install gitea, and oh-my-zsh will be the default shell for the provided users.

2. Prepare a Proxmox Node

In the case that you want to be able to auto-deploy LXC containers on proxmox, you need to first generate the template folder for the node using the following:

ansible-playbook playbooks/generate_node.yml -e "node_name=<your_node_name_here>"

This will create a folder like this:

proxmox_nodes
└── your_node_name_here
    ├── .token
    └── main.yml

You can then add your token into the encrypted .token file using:

ansible-vault edit proxmox_nodes/your_node_name_here/.token

the main.yml file contains the token id, node url, and the ansible user public key. Fill those in as well.

3. Prepare your hosts

With the inventory populated you can generate the templates required to deploy your hosts using the following:

ansible-playbook playbooks/generate_hostvars.yml

What this does is populate the host_vars folder with templates for the various required variables. In the case of testhost.homelab showed in step 1 this would create a folder like so:

inventory
└── host_vars
    └── testhost.homelab
        ├── lxc.yml
        ├── ohmyzsh.yml
        ├── .credentials.yml
        └── files
            └── gitea.app.ini.j2

Fill the content according to the appropriate pages on the left.

Important

If you’re using multiple services that uses .credentials, only the first template is copied over. You can get the content of the others in global_files/host_secret_templates

4. Fill in your global variables

A file is provided under inventory/group_vars/all.yml that contains various useful variables that needs to be filled

timezone

  • Required

  • The timezone that will be used on your deployed container or some services

additional_user_key_pair

  • Optional

  • dict

  • format: {user: public_ssh_key}

  • users to be added to deployed containers

ansible_pubkey

  • Required

  • Public key for the default ansible user. Used to bootstrap lxc container

default_lxc_image

  • Required

  • default CT template to deploy lxc container, changing this can and will break the work flow but it should be an easy-fix™

default_netif_config

  • Required

  • default netif configuration to deploy lxc container