Ubersmith Installation and Upgrade Utility

Summary

The Ubersmith Installer is a command line utility that allows a system administrator to install (or upgrade) Ubersmith on a supported platform without assistance from Ubersmith Support. This can be useful when access to the Ubersmith environment is restricted, or for provisioning development/testing environments. The installer can be used to install both the Ubersmith Core (frontend) software as well as the Ubersmith Appliance.

Installation

Prepare the Host

Ensure that your host has been updated to the latest available packages as well as the latest Linux kernel. If necessary, reboot to ensure that the system is running the latest kernel.

The Ubersmith Installer requires that Docker, as well as some additional dependencies be installed prior to installing Ubersmith. The script located at:

https://get.docker.com/

can be helpful when installing Docker. Ensure that Docker is configured to start on boot; in many cases it may not be.

The installation process will fail without these dependencies.

CentOS 7

sudo yum install gcc libffi-devel python-devel openssl-devel epel-release

Once EPEL is configured, run:

sudo yum install python-pip

Debian 8 / Ubuntu LTS

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev python-setuptools

Clone the Repository or Download a Release

On the host Ubersmith is to be installed on, clone the ubersmith_installer repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/TeamUbersmith/ubersmith_installer.git

Alternatively, you can download a tarball release of the installer from here.

Install

Run ./install_ubersmith.sh to install Ubersmith Core or ./install_appliance.sh to install the Ubersmith Appliance.

Follow the prompts to complete the installation.

Checking for pip...
Installing Ansible...
Installing Ubersmith...
Choose an installation directory for Ubersmith [/usr/local/ubersmith]:
Enter the address where you will be hosting Ubersmith [ubersmith.example.com]: 
Enter the email address of the Ubersmith administrator [admin@example.org]:

At this point the installer will begin, and will create the directory structure and supporting files to bring Ubersmith online.

Ubersmith Core and Ubersmith Appliance should not be deployed to the same host.

Configure

Ubersmith is now listening for HTTPS connections; to load the Ubersmith installation wizard go to the address of IP of your Ubersmith host in your web browser, for example:

https://10.0.0.1

Walk through the steps of the Ubersmith Setup Wizard.

When configuring the Solr search engine, use the values:

• Server: ubersmith_solr_1
• Port: 8983
• Path: /solr/collection1

At the end of the Setup Wizard, you will be prompted to delete the setup directory. The command provided does not account for the Ubersmith webroot being located in a container, so run the following command instead:

# docker exec ubersmith_web_1 rm -rf /var/www/ubersmith_root/app/www/setup

Upgrade

Before upgrading, be sure to back up your Ubersmith database.

Clone the Repository or Download a Release

On the host Ubersmith is to be installed on, clone the ubersmith_installer repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/TeamUbersmith/ubersmith_installer.git

Alternatively, you can download a tarball release of the installer from here.

If you have never used the Ubersmith installation / upgrade utility before, configuration is necessary. Without running the configuration step, the upgrade utility will fail. Run configure.sh to configure the location of your existing Ubersmith installation, as well as your Ubersmith URL/address, and an email address associated with the Ubersmith administrator. Follow the steps to configure your environment:

$ ./configure.sh               
Configuring the Ubersmith installer for an existing installation...
Current path in use by Ubersmith / Appliance [/usr/local/ubersmith]:
Enter the address in use by Ubersmith / Appliance [ubersmith.example.com]: ubersmith.mydomain.com
Enter the email address of the Ubersmith administrator [admin@example.org]: jsmith@mydomain.com

[ output follows ]

localhost                  : ok=3    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=0   

This step creates the file .ubersmith_installer.ini in the home directory of the user running the configuration utility.

To upgrade Ubersmith, run the ./upgrade_ubersmith.sh script. The upgrade process will complete automatically.

Troubleshooting

• When running CentOS, if the installer is unable to install pip, you may need to enable the EPEL yum repository.
• Do not install the OS provided `pip` packages for Ubuntu and Debian as the version of `pip` provided is older and has difficulty installing the dependencies for the Ubersmith installer. python-setuptools will install the easy_install utility, which will allow the installer to install a more contemporary version of pip.
• Dependencies installed by pip will installed using the --user option, which will install to the Python user install directory for your platform; typically ~/.local/. (See the Python documentation for site.USER_BASE for full details.) This allows for the installer to be executed as a non-root user. You may want to add this directory to your PATH shell variable so that the supporting utilities (docker-compose, for example) can be run without having to specify the full path to the utility.