Riak Control

Announcement and discussions in OpenRiak/riak#18.

Riak Control is a standalone companion application for OpenRiak. It provides a web-based UI for:

• Initial deployment of OpenRiak nodes to remote machines (such as AWS instances);
• Cluster admin operations:
  • observing nodes (riak admin cluster status, with additional details such as memory usage, uptime);
  • operation on nodes: stage (leave, join, replace, force replace, down, stop), plan, commit;
  • inspection of effective app env vars on individual nodes;
  • inspecting and editing advanced.config on nodes;
  • restarting nodes: individually, also rolling restart of entire cluster (requires riak-deadmanshand agent running on target nodes alongside riak).
• Observing backend status (currently leveled only).
• TictacAAE status.
• Managing users, groups.

It is implemented as a single-page web app written in Elm. Assuming you installed it from a package, start it with riak-control and point your browser at :8091.

Compatibility note: While Riak Control can be used to deploy nodes of any version, its full functionality (cluster observability, monitoring and admin tasks) will only work with OpenRiak version 3.4.x and later.

Configuring

The port on which the server running Riak Control web app will be listening can be set via environment variable RIAK_CONTROL_PORT.

rctl.conf

{
    "admin": {
        "name": "barsyk",
        "password": "b72fd0f9173971a62181358f796f7304f2c7fb48ef6cc109331652b8808fafb5"
    }
}

where the value for "password" is hashlib.sha256(b"password").hexdigest().

Preparing OpenRiak

On the riak side, several steps need to be taken on the node Riak Control will be connecting to.

Security setup

• Enable riak security, thus: riak admin security enable.

• Create a user (riak admin security add-user $RIAK_CONTROL_USER password=$PASSWORD). These will be the user and password you will configure Riak Control with.

• Importantly, riak admin security grant riak_kv.riak_control on any to $RIAK_CONTROL_USER.

• Also, riak admin security add-source all 127.0.0.1/32 password (substitute "127.0.0.1/32" as appropriate).

Configure OpenRiak

• riak.conf:

  • uncomment and set listener.https.internal to IP:PORT riak_control will be connecting to.

  • uncomment ssl.certfile, ssl.keyfile and ssl.cacertfile (and of course put all the keys and certiicate files in $(platform_etc_dir).

• advanced.config:

  • {riak_kv, [{secure_referer_check, false}]} (this should be properly dealt with before a 1.0 release).