Ansible Role: strfry

This Ansible Role builds and installs strfry, and also sets up strfry-policies. It is intended to be composed with a separate role to handle the web proxy configuration.

Tested on:

• Archlinux
• Debian 11
• Ubuntu 22.04

Requirements

None.

Role Variables

strfry_version: beta # git repository branch or release tag
strfry_make_jobs: "{{ ansible_processor_cores }}" # number of CPUs to build with
strfry_skip_config: no
strfry_policies_enabled: yes

See the role defaults.

If you are not using the beta branch/version, you should override the template with your own by enabling strfry_skip_config and managing the configuration manually.

strfry_skip_config: yes

For more configuration info, see the relevant upstream configuration example for your branch/version.

Example Playbook

- hosts: strfry
  roles:
    - role: bleetube.strfry
    - role: nginxinc.nginx_core.nginx
      become: yes
  tasks:
    - import_tasks: nginx_conf.yml
      become: yes

A sample nginx configuration is provided.

For a fully functional production example that includes hosting multiple relays, see this homelab stack.

Upgrades

Occasionally there are upgrades that require rebuilding the database. You need to export before upgrading, and then import with the new binary. The role might do the export step, but the import needs to be done manually. Don't rely on the role for the backup. Here's a simple example:

# Before upgrade
doas -u strfry strfry export > /tmp/backup.jsonl
# After upgrade
systemctl stop strfry
mv strfry-db/data.mdb strfry-db/backup.mdb
cat /tmp/backup.jsonl | doas -u strfry strfry import
doas -u strfry strfry compact strfry-db/compact.mdb
mv strfry-db/compact.mdb strfry-db/data.mdb
systemctl start strfry

This is by no means the cleanest way to upgrade, but you get the idea. It's possible to perform the import in a separate process (I think you'd just use a different config file) and then sync the two databases before performing a zero downtime restart.

Troubleshooting

• If an upgrade fails to build, it could be due to previously built objects. A simple workaround is to delete the strfry source folder ~/src/strfry and let it try to build from scratch.

• If make fails, try building on a single core:

  ansible-playbook playbooks/strfry/main.yml -e 'strfry_make_jobs=1'
  

• Reading your logs:

  systemctl status strfry
  journalctl -fu strfry
  

Maintenance

• You should periodically run compact on your strfry database.

  systemctl stop strfry
  doas -u strfry strfry compact strfry-db/compact.mdb
  mv strfry-db/compact.mdb strfry-db/data.mdb
  systemctl start strfry
  

• You can prune events from the database, reducing it's size will reduce the overall compute load on the relay. Make a backup beforehand. Here is a simple example of deleting events that are more than 90 days old:

  doas -u strfry strfry export > /tmp/backup.jsonl
  doas -u strfry strfry delete --age=$((90 * 24 * 60 * 60))
  

  For a more advanced pruning strategy, you can implement an export/import process to remove certain kinds of events more aggresively. See bleetube/strfry-prune for an example.