railiance-cluster/QUICKSTART.md

Railiance Newcomer Quickstart

Welcome to Railiance 🚂✨ — an opinionated Infrastructure‑as‑Code framework. This guide is written for newcomers who want to set up their very first Railiance host.

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0. Get the code

Clone this repository locally and enter it:

git clone https://<your-gitea-domain>/<org-or-user>/railiance-bootstrap.git
cd railiance-bootstrap

(Replace <your-gitea-domain> and <org-or-user> with your setup.)

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1. Check your environment

Make sure you have these installed locally:

• Git
• Ansible
• Python 3
• SSH client

Check with:

bin/railiance doctor

This command will confirm prerequisites.

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2. Provision a new VM

Recommended host specs:

• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• 2 vCPU, 4–8 GB RAM
• 60 GB SSD

bin/railiance plan-host

When creating the VM, inject your SSH key and, if possible, apply the provided cloudinit/user-data.yaml.

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3. Prepare your SSH key

If you don’t already have an SSH key:

bin/railiance gen-ssh-key

Upload your SSH public key to your cloud provider or VM host

Once your key pair is generated (~/.ssh/id_<KEY>.pub), copy the public key to the VM.
Replace <IP> with your server’s public IP and <USER> with the default login user (commonly ubuntu or root).

scp ~/.ssh/id_<KEY>.pub <USER>@<IP>:/home/<USER>/authorized_keys.tmp
ssh <USER>@<IP> "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat ~/authorized_keys.tmp >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys && rm ~/authorized_keys.tmp && chmod 700 ~/.ssh && chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

This will:

• copy your public key to the host,
• append it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys,
• set correct permissions.

After this, you should be able to log in without a password:

ssh <USER>@<IP>

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4. Create your inventory

Copy the example inventory:

cp ansible/hosts.ini.example ansible/hosts.ini

Edit ansible/hosts.ini and add the IP or hostname of your Railiance host.

Test that Ansible can reach it:

ansible -i ansible/hosts.ini all -m ping

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5. Seed the host

Log in to the host and run the seed script:

tools/seed_node.sh

This will clone the repo on the host, set up housekeeping, and get ready for provisioning.

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6. Bootstrap with Ansible

From your local machine:

ansible-playbook -i ansible/hosts.ini ansible/bootstrap.yml

This installs prerequisites and sets up a single‑node k3s cluster.

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7. Verify

Run the smoke test:

tests/smoke_kube.sh

If successful, you now have a working Railiance host 🎉

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Next steps

• Explore ansible/ playbooks for services (e.g., uptime-kuma, postgres).
• Read docs/README.md for philosophy and design.
• Join the community and contribute improvements!

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