Pikachoun Clothing is a fictional company that needs their Wordpress blogging platform automated. This is part of an assessment from Rackspace for people applying for the role of Automation Engineer.

Pikachoun Clothing has provided a list of requirements that their platform needs to adhere to, but to discourage other people taking the same assessment I have chosen not to publish them here. Study the structure of the project and the history of the repository and you will get a good sense of what is asked, though. :)

This project makes use of a mix of Python and Ruby libraries. Because it uses Ansible, you must use Python 2, Python 3 is not supported.

Python requirements can be installed like this:

# Not strictly necessary, but highly recommended
virtualenv --python /usr/bin/python2 virtualenv
source virtualenv/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

Ruby requirements can be installed like this (this assumes you have bundler installed already):

bundle install

Additionally, Vagrant also needs to be installed.

By running vagrant up, a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 LTS machine will be created and booted up, ready to be provisioned for Pikachoun's blog. Once the Vagrant machine has booted, the Ansible deploy-blog.yml playbook can be played in order to provision it:

vagrant up
ansible-playbook deploy-blog.yml

A rake task, rake provision has been provided which does both for you.

Note: The following hosts entry is assumed to be present on the host machine: 192.168.98.10 wordpress.localdomain pma.localdomain

A sample config and database for wordpress has been provided for testing purposes. These may be installed by running the rake task sampleinstall.

Please note that this is a sample database only! The admin account has username admin and password admin.

This projects makes use of two seperate test suites. It uses serverspec to make assertions about the state of the machine and uses a py.test testsuite to do some higher-level integration testing.

A rake task, rake tests has been provided which runs both of these testsuites for you. You can also use the individual rake serverspec and rake pytest to run them individually.

Note: It is assumed that the sample config and database are installed

Varnish is set up to cache aggressively which means that, without a plugin to purge the cache at the right times, stale content will be served (for example after a user comments or a new post is made). It is assumed a plugin such as Varnish HTTP Purge or WordPress Varnish is installed to selectively purge the cache when needed.

If installing such a plugin is out of the question, then one may choose to set a low value (such as 5 minutes) for wordpress_varnish_ttl (the default is a moderately low 1 hour) in order to have some caching benefits but keep content from becoming too stale.