Ansible and Vagrant

Ansible is an open-source tool for automating deployment and server-management related steps. ChirpStack provides a so-called Ansible-playbook which can be used to deploy the ChirpStack stack, including all requirements. The source of this playbook, including additional documentation how to use this, can be found at https://github.com/brocaar/chirpstack-ansible-playbook.

Local VM deployment using Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool for automating the creation of virtual machines. It can integrate with Ansible so that it not only create the VM for you, but also will install all ChirpStack stack components.

After following the instructions mentioned in the chirpstack-ansible-playbook repository, this allows you to create a local test environment running inside a VM:

vagrant up

As this is using exactly the same Ansible-playbook as for remote deployments, this can also be used for testing before doing a remote deployment, e.g. when making modifications to the playbook.

Remote deployment

Ansible can also be used to perform remote deployments. You need to setup a so-called inventory of servers, to which Ansible will connect for executing the deployment steps. After following the steps mentioned in chirpstack-ansible-playbook, the following would perform a remote deployment:

ansible-playbook -i inventory full_deploy.yml