Step 5 - Deploy App Protect via CI/CD pipeline

In this lab, we will install NGINX Plus and App Protect packages on CentOS with a CI/CD pipeline. F5 maintains the NGINX Ansible playbooks on Galaxy which allows customers to easily setup App Protect.

Note

The official Ansible NAP role is available here https://github.com/nginxinc/ansible-role-nginx-app-protect and the NGINX Plus role here https://github.com/nginxinc/ansible-role-nginx

Note

This example is available on Github: https://github.com/nginx-architects/UDF-App-Protect-cicd

Uninstall the previous running NAP

  1. SSH to the CentOS-VM

  2. Remove the existing installation NAP in order to start from scratch. App Protect depends on NGINX Plus, so simply removing it will also remove everything we need.

    /home/centos/lab-files/remove-app-protect-cleanup.sh
    nap

    Run the CI/CD pipeline from Gitlab

    Steps:

    1. RDP to the Jumphost with credentials user:user

    2. Open Firefox and open Gitlab (if not already opened)

    3. Select the repository nap-deploy-centos and go to CI /CD

gitlab

  1. Run the Pipeline by clicking the green button. The installation can take up to 10 minutes as the install is very I/O intensive.

The pipeline is as below:

stages:
    - Requirements
    - Deploy_nap
    - Workaround_dns

Requirements:
    stage: Requirements
    script:
        - ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml --force

Deploy_nap:
    stage: Deploy_nap
    script:
        - ansible-playbook -i hosts ./ansible/nap32.yml

Workaround_dns:
    stage: Workaround_dns
    script:
        - ansible-playbook -i hosts copy-nginx-conf.yml

Note

As you can notice, the Requirements stage installs the requirements. We use the parameter --force in order to be sure we download and install the latest version of the lab.

Note

This pipeline executes 2 Ansible playbooks.

  1. One playbook to install NAP (which also installs NGINX Plus)

  2. The last playbook is just there to fix an issue in UDF for the DNS resolver

pipeline

When the pipeline is finished executing, perform a browser test within Firefox using the Arcadia NAP CentOS bookmark

Note

Congrats, you have deployed NGINX Plus and NAP with a CI/CD pipeline. You can check the pipelines in GitLab if you are interested to see what has been coded behind the scenes.