Available in a Ansible Playbook raspifarm-master-essentials.yml
We want to have our own little intranet with a custom, local-only domain named .raspifarm. So for example, if a user who is connected to the cluster’s network enters “http://home.raspifarm” in a browser, the user shall see a tiny little webpage.
Thus, we’re going to install an Apache webserver on the master node.
For the home page demo, you will have to have a DNS server running, which is configured as described here
Install apache webserver
sudo apt-get install apache2
That’s already it… installation-wise.
Prepare a directory where a “home” page is stored
The web site or application for “http://home.raspifarm” has to be somewhere in a folder, usually one puts them within here /var/www/. Let’s do this, well name the web site home:
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/home
sudo chown -R farmer:admin /var/www/home/ # assuming you have the farmer user
touch /var/www/home/index.html
Then paste a tiny bit of HTML code into /var/www/home/index.html
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Welcome to the raspifarm Network</title>
</head>
<body>
This is the 'home' page
</body>
</html>
So, our web page is almost ready. Now we have to tell Apache where to find it.
Configure a default page for HTTP requests in apache
In Apache you can configure multiple websites, they call this “Virtual Hosts”. There’s also a default “Virtual Host”, which will use for our “home” page.
The configuration files for sites are stored here /etc/apache2/sites-available/
Modify the preconfigured default configuration /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf, like so:
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/home
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Note that this is a super-basic configuration, there’s much more you can do with Apache, we won’t go into detail here though.
However, it’s time to restart Apache:
sudo service apache2 restart
Then, make sure you’re connected to the cluster’s network (you should have an IP in 192.168.17.x) and check if Apache and the DNS do their work correctly by opening http://home.raspifarm.
$ curl http://home.raspifarm
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Welcome to the raspifarm Network</title>
</head>
<body>
This is the 'home' page
</body>
</html>
One last thing: Since the “home” page is our default page, so apache returns it if the URL ([something].raspifarm) does not match any other configured web pages. Go and try curl http://go-and-try-this.url.raspifarm. Nice, right?