6G-Sandbox-Sites

Repository with unique information for each 6G-Sandbox site. It use composed of different yaml files with different variables usable by the 6G-Library components.

Table of Contents

• Site Directory Structure
• How to encrypt your site files
  • 1. Install ansible-core
  • 2. Set a password to encrypt/decrypt
  • 3. Encrypt your site file
• Development Guidelines

Site Directory Structure

site_name/       # Folder with the site name
└── core.yaml    # File containing the encrypted site information

The repository is made up of yaml variable files divided into different directories representing each site. The purpose of having a different directory per site is in case future releases allow importing more than one file per site (apart from core.yaml).

The .dummy_site/core.yaml file serves as a template of the information that can/should be indicated for each site.

The files belonging to each site are encrypted with a passphrase using the Ansible vault utility.

How to encrypt your site files

This section aims to serve as a guide on how to fill your site's core.yaml file.

1. Install ansible-core

To use the ansible-vault tool, the full ansible libraries and binaries are not needed. You can install ansible in your prefered way, but package ansible-core is enough. If you do not wish to install ansible anywhere, remember it is already installed on the Jenkins VM so you can use it from there.

2. Set a password to encrypt/decrypt

Your password should be a random string of characters stored in a file.

Caution

Try to avoid scapable special characters as ", ', `, ´, #, $, &,...

Unpredictable errors might happen.

Tip

Typical recommendations are:

• String size: >=20
• Uppercase letters (A-Z)
• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special characters (excluding scapable special characters)

You can use any online password generator to create it.

3. Encrypt your site file

ansible-vault encrypt <site_name>/core.yaml --vault-password-file=path/to/password.txt

where:

• <site_name>/core.yaml is the path to the file you want to encrypt.
• --vault-password-file=path/file_name.txt is the path containing the password.

Running this command will replace the original contents of the file with the encrypted text.

With the same syntaxt, you can use other ansible-vault commands to edit your encrypted file:

• ansible-vault edit; Opens the file to correct its unencrypted content.
• ansible-vault decrypt; Decrypts the content of the file, replacing the encrypted text with the unencrypted one.

Development guidelines

Despite the main branch having a directory for all known sites, we are aware that development might involve a lot of minor commits that can blur the repo for other developers. Thus, the recommended way of using this repository is to fork it or to make your own branch, where you can do as many commits as you want. When you consider that your core.yaml file is stable enough and might not need more changes in the near future, you can merge your branch/fork into main to have everything in a default centralyzed repository.

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