Running Django checks in production runtime - django

I have a Django app that is deployed on kubernetes. The container also has a mount to a persistent volume containing some files that are needed for operation. I want to have a check that will check that the files are there and accessible during runtime everytime a pod starts. The Django documentation recommends against running checks in production (the app runs in uwsgi), and because the files are only available in the production environment, the check will fail when unit tested.
What would be an acceptable process for executing the checks in production?

This is a community wiki answer posted for better visibility. Feel free to expand it.
Your use case can be addressed from Kubernetes perspective. All you have to do is to use the Startup probes:
The kubelet uses startup probes to know when a container application
has started. If such a probe is configured, it disables liveness and
readiness checks until it succeeds, making sure those probes don't
interfere with the application startup. This can be used to adopt
liveness checks on slow starting containers, avoiding them getting
killed by the kubelet before they are up and running.
With it you can use the ExecAction that would execute a specified command inside the container. The diagnostic would be considered successful if the command exits with a status code of 0. An example of a simple command check could be one that checks if a particular file exists:
exec:
command:
- stat
- /file_directory/file_name.txt
You could also use a shell script but remember that:
Command is the command line to execute inside the container, the
working directory for the command is root ('/') in the container's
filesystem. The command is simply exec'd, it is not run inside a
shell, so traditional shell instructions ('|', etc) won't work. To use
a shell, you need to explicitly call out to that shell.

Related

AWS-RunBashScript errors/warnings with Python

I have many EC2 instances that retain Celery jobs for processing. To efficiently start the overall task of completing the queue, I have tested AWS-RunBashScript in AWS' SSM with a BASH script that calls a Python script. For example, for a single instance this begins with sh start_celery.sh.
When I run the command in SSM, this is the following output (compare to other output below, after reading on):
/home/ec2-user/dh2o-py/venv/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/celery/utils/imports.py:167:
UserWarning: Cannot load celery.commands extension u'flower.command:FlowerCommand':
ImportError('No module named compat',)
namespace, class_name, exc))
/home/ec2-user/dh2o-py/tasks/task_harness.py:49: YAMLLoadWarning: calling yaml.load() without
Loader=... is deprecated, as the default Loader is unsafe. Please read https://msg.pyyaml.org/load for full details.
task_configs = yaml.load(conf)
Running a worker with superuser privileges when the worker accepts messages serialized with pickle is a very bad idea!
If you really want to continue then you have to set the C_FORCE_ROOT
environment variable (but please think about this before you do).
User information: uid=0 euid=0 gid=0 egid=0
failed to run commands: exit status 1
Note that only warnings are thrown. When I SSH to the same instance and run the same command (i.e. sh start_celery.sh), the following (same) output results BUT the process runs:
I have verified that the process does NOT run when doing this via SSM, and I have no idea why. As a work-around, I tried running the sh start_celery.sh command with bootstrapping in user data for each EC2, but that failed too.
So, why does SSM fail to actually run the process that I succeed in doing by actually via SSH to each instance running identical commands? The details below relate to machine and Python configuration:

How to create unit test cases for Ansible functionalities?

I want to add unit testing for my ansible playbook. I am new to this and have tried few things but didn't understood much. How can I start on this and write a test case properly?
Following is the simple example:
yum:
name: httpd
state: present
Ansible is not a programming language but a tool that will check the state you describe is aligned with the state of the node your run in against. So you cannot unit tests your tasks. They are in a certain way tests by themselves already. The underlying ansible binary that runs those task has unit tests itself used during its development.
Your example above is asking ansible to test if httpd is present on the target machine and will return ok if this is the case, changed if it had to install the package to fulfill the requirement, or error if something went wrong.
Meanwhile, it is not because you cannot unit test your ansible code that no tests are possible at all. You can perform basic static checks with yammlint and ansible-lint. To go further, you will have to run your playbook/role/collection against a test target node.
This has become quite easy with CI that will let you spawn virtual machines or docker container from scratch and run your script to test that no error is fired, the --check option passes successfully, idempotency is obeyed (i.e. nothing should change on a second run with the same parameters), and everything works as expected (e.g. in your above case port 80 is opened and your get the default Apache web page).
You can write those kind of tests yourself (running against localhost in a test vm for example). This Mac Appstore CLI role by Geerlinguy is using such tests through travis-ci as an example.
You can also use existing tools to help you write those tests in a more structured way like molecule. Here are some example roles using it if you are interested:
Redis role by Geerlinguy
nexus3-oss role by ThoTeam [1]
[1] Note for transparency: I am the maintainer of this example repository

Google cloud compute startup script ignored with no logging

I have a standard Debian 8.9 instance on google cloud compute (GCE) where my startup script is ignored.
In the custom metadata field, for startup-script, I am trying to run an Rscript (which is used for batch execution of R files), followed by a system shutdown, with the following:
#! /bin/bash
sudo /usr/bin/Rscript /home/myuser/launch_script.R
sudo shutdown -h now
Starting the instance is immediately followed by a shutdown and the Rscript is ignored. Removing the last line to shutdown causes the GCE instance to start, but the Rscript to be ignored. Running just "sudo /usr/bin/Rscript /home/myuser/launch_script.R" from the terminal results in the script being run. It has a chmod of 755, so I don't think this is a permissions issue.
In addition to this problem, I have read elsewhere that logging should happen in /var/log/, but there is nothing there. Instead, I have a bunch of log files (that only contain the start-up script and nothing else) in the root of my instance:
I got in touch with Google cloud support, who gave the following response:
script definition is kept under /var/run/google.startup.script
If the script does not run initially, you can force it manually with : $ sudo google_metadata_script_runner --script-type startup # for Debian, or # sudo /usr/share/google/run-startup-scripts # on Ubuntu and older images
I'm posting this information here, because it is not in their documentation (as of August 2017). I'm not sure how helpful it is, since the google.startup.script didn't exist in my case (using the latest Debian image on GCE), but I did run the other commands.
However, I think my main issues were:
I was using autossh to connect to a remote database. The startup-script was running before autossh. Building a 40 second delay into the script and running the script as a user (not sudo-type root) seems to have solved this problem for now. Autossh was being run as the main user, which I think gets loaded before lower-privilege user-defined scripts get loaded.
I was using some gcloud commands from the user account which had its own authentication issues. Running gcloud auth login as the user and ensuring correct permissions on my private key solved this.
Always remember to check the messages and syslog files in /var/log for troubleshooting. This allowed me to see the order of things being loaded at system-boot.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk - Starting SWF Background Workers

I have been trying to find out the best way to run background jobs using PHP on AWS Elastic beanstalk, and after many hours searching on Google and SO, I believe that one good solution is using SWF and activity workers.
I found this example buried in the aws-sdk-for-php: https://github.com/amazonwebservices/aws-sdk-for-php/tree/master/_samples/AmazonSimpleWorkflow/cron
The read-me file says:
To run this sample, you need to execute three scripts from the command line in separate terminal/console windows
and
Note that the start_cron_example_workflow.php script will exit quickly
while the decider and activity worker scripts keep running until you
manually terminate them.
the decider and activity worker will loop "forever", and trying to run these in EB is what I'm having trouble doing.
In my .ebextensions directory I have a file that executes these files:
container_commands:
01background_task:
command: "php -f start_cron_example_activity_workers.php"
02background_task:
command: "php -f start_cron_example_workflow_workers.php"
But I get the following error messages:
ERROR
Failed to deploy application version.
ERROR
Some instances have not responded to commands. Responses were not received from [i-a5417ed4].
Any way I can do this using config files? How can I make this work in AWS EB without introducing a single point of failure?
Thank you.
You might consider using a service like IronWorker — this is specifically designed for what you are trying to do and will probably work better than putting together your own solution on a micro instance.
I have not used Iron.io yet, but was evaluating it as I am looking to move my stuff over to AWS so I need to have cron jobs handled as well.
Have you taken a look at the Fat Controller ? It can daemonise anything. There's documentation and examples on the website: http://fat-controller.sourceforge.net

Building project from cron task

When I build project from terminal by using 'xcodebuild' command I succeed, but when I try to do run same script from cron task I receive error
"Code Sign error: The identity '****' doesn't match any valid certificate/private key pair in the default keychain"
I think problem is in settings and permissions of crontab utility, it seems crontab does not see my keychain
Can anyone provide me terminal command how to make my keychain visible for crontab
I encountered a similar issue with trying to build nightly via cron. The only resolution I found was to create a plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons/ and load it via launchctl. The key necessary is "SessionCreate" otherwise you will quickly run in to problems similar to what was encountered with trying to use cron -- namely that your user login.keychain is not available to the process. "SessionCreate" is similar to "su -l" in that (as far as I understand) it simulates a login and thus default keychains you expect will be available; otherwise, you are stuck with only the System keychain despite the task running as your user.
I found the answers (though not the top answer currently) here useful in troublw shooting this issue: Missing certificates and keys in the keychain while using Jenkins/Hudson as Continuous Integration for iOS and Mac development
You execute your cron job with which account ?
most probably the problem !!
You can add
echo `whoami`
at the beginning of your script to see with which user the script is launched.
Also when a Bash script is launched from cron, it don't use the same environment variable (non login shell) as when you launch it as a user.
When the script launches from cron, it doesn't load your $HOME/.profile (or .bash_profile). Anything you run from cron has to be 100% self-sufficient in terms of it's environment. I'd suggest you make yourself a file called something like "set_build_env.sh" It should contain everything from your .profile that you need to build, such as $PATH, $HOME, $CLASSPATH etc. Then in your build script, load set_build_env.sh using the dot notation or source cmd as ericc said. You should also remove the build-specific lines from your.profile and then source set_build_env from there too so only one place to maintain. Example:
source /home/dmitry/set_build_env.sh #absolute path
. /home/dmitry/set_build_env.sh #dot-space notation same as "source"