This is a step by step guide for deploying the Mender Server for production environments, and will cover relevant security and reliability aspects of Mender production installations. The Mender backend services can be deployed to production using a skeleton provided in the production directory of the integration repository. Most of the steps are the same whether you are installing the Open Source or Enterprise edition of the Mender Server, but there are some extra steps that are covered in the Enterprise subsection.

Prerequisites

• A machine with Ubuntu 18.04 (e.g. an instance from AWS EC2 or DigitalOcean) with the following tools installed:
  • git
  • Docker Engine, version 17.03 or later.
  • Docker Compose, version 1.6 or later.
• Minimum of 10 GB free disk space and 4 GB RAM available for Mender and its services.
  • This heavily depends on your scale and environment, the supported Mender Enterprise edition is recommended for larger-scale environments.
• A public IP address assigned and ports 443 and 9000 publicly accessible.
• Allocated DNS names for the Mender API Gateway and the Mender Storage Proxy that resolve to the public IP of the Mender server by the devices. By following this guide all services will be hosted on the same server, so you can use just one domain name for both. If you are just testing you can use a temporary domain name obtained from services like https://ipq.co.

If you are setting up a Mender Enterprise server, you will also need:

• An account with Mender in order to evaluate and use the commercial features in Mender Enterprise. Please email contact@mender.io to receive an evaluation account.

Deployment steps

The guide will use a publicly available Mender integration repository. Then proceed with setting up a local branch, preparing deployment configuration from a template, committing the changes locally. Keeping deployment configuration in a git repository ensures that the history of changes is tracked and subsequent updates can be easily applied.

At the end of this guide you will have:

• production configuration in a single docker-compose file
• a running Mender backend cluster
• persistent service data is stored in Docker volumes:
  • artifact storage
  • MongoDB data
• SSL certificate for the API Gateway
• SSL certificate for the Storage Proxy
• a set of keys for generating and validating access tokens

Consult the section on certificates and keys for details on how the certificates and keys are used in the system.

Docker compose naming scheme

docker-compose implements a particular naming scheme for containers, volumes and networks that prefixes each object it creates with project name. By default, the project is named after the directory the main compose file is located in. The production configuration template provided in the repository explicitly sets project name to menderproduction.

docker-compose automatically assigns a com.docker.compose.project=menderproduction label to the created containers. The label can be used when filtering output of commands such as docker ps.

Basic preparation setup

Start off by cloning the Mender integration repository into a local directory named mender-server:

git clone -b 2.4.1 https://github.com/mendersoftware/integration mender-server

Cloning into 'deployment'...
remote: Counting objects: 1117, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (11/11), done.
remote: Total 1117 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 1106
Receiving objects: 100% (1117/1117), 233.85 KiB | 411.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (678/678), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

Enter the directory:

cd mender-server

Prepare a branch where all deployment related changes will be kept:

git checkout -b my-production-setup

Enter the production directory:

cd production

Copy the production template to its own file:

cp config/prod.yml.template config/prod.yml

ls -l *

-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user  725 Sep 17 14:14 run

config:
total 24
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  566 Sep 17 14:14 enterprise.yml.template
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 5814 Sep 10 15:44 prod.yml
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 5752 Sep 17 14:14 prod.yml.template

The template includes a few files:

• run - a convenience helper that invokes docker-compose by passing the required compose files; arguments passed to run in command line are forwarded directly to docker-compose

• prod.yml and prod.yml.template - contains deployment-specific configuration, builds on top of docker-compose.yml (located at the root of integration repository)

• enterprise.yml.template - configuration for running an Enterprise instance of the Mender server. This topic is covered separately in the Enterprise part of the Production installation guide

At this point all changes should be committed to the repository:

git add .

git commit -m 'production: initial template'

[my-production-setup 556cc2e] production: initial template
 1 file changed, 54 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 production/config/prod.yml

Assuming that current working directory is still production, download necessary Docker images:

./run pull

Pulling mender-mongo (mongo:3.4)...
3.4: Pulling from library/mongo
Digest: sha256:aff0c497cff4f116583b99b21775a8844a17bcf5c69f7f3f6028013bf0d6c00c
Status: Image is up to date for mongo:3.4
...
Pulling mender-gui (mendersoftware/gui:latest)...
latest: Pulling from mendersoftware/gui
b7f33cc0b48e: Already exists
31e101b48355: Pull complete
307a023cd01f: Pull complete
2edcf3035646: Pull complete
aeb59eb28f90: Pull complete
...
Pulling mender-useradm (mendersoftware/useradm:latest)...
latest: Pulling from mendersoftware/useradm
Digest: sha256:3346985a2679b7edd9243363c4b1c291871481f8c6f557ccdc51af58dc6d3a1a
Status: Image is up to date for mendersoftware/useradm:latest
Pulling mender-device-auth (mendersoftware/deviceauth:latest)...
latest: Pulling from mendersoftware/deviceauth
Digest: sha256:ed47310dc9a86cca70d52c520d565ef9814f39421f2faa02d60bbe8a1dbd63c5
Status: Image is up to date for mendersoftware/deviceauth:latest
Pulling mender-api-gateway (mendersoftware/api-gateway:latest)...
latest: Pulling from mendersoftware/api-gateway
Digest: sha256:97243de3da950e754ada73abf8c123001c0a0c8b20344256dc7db4c89c0ecd82
Status: Image is up to date for mendersoftware/api-gateway:latest

Certificates and keys

First, set the public domain name of your server (the URL your devices will reach your Mender server on):

API_GATEWAY_DOMAIN_NAME="mender.example.com"  # NB! replace with your server's public domain name
STORAGE_PROXY_DOMAIN_NAME="$API_GATEWAY_DOMAIN_NAME"  # change if you are hosting the Storage Proxy on a different domain name (not the default)

Prepare certificates using the helper script keygen:

CERT_API_CN=$API_GATEWAY_DOMAIN_NAME CERT_STORAGE_CN=$STORAGE_PROXY_DOMAIN_NAME ../keygen

Generating a 256 bit EC private key
writing new private key to 'private.key'
...
All keys and certificates have been generated in directory keys-generated.
Please include them in your docker compose and device builds.
For more information please see https://docs.mender.io/Administration/Certificates-and-keys.

Your local directory tree should now look like this:

├── keys-generated
│   ├── certs
│   │   ├── api-gateway
│   │   │   ├── cert.crt
│   │   │   └── private.key
│   │   └── server.crt
│   │   └── storage-proxy
│   │       ├── cert.crt
│   │       └── private.key
│   └── keys
│       ├── deviceauth
│       │   └── private.key
│       └── useradm
│           └── private.key
├── config/enterprise.yml.template
├── config/prod.yml
├── config/prod.yml.template
└── run

The production template file prod.yml is already configured to load keys and certificates from locations created by the keygen script. If you wish to use a different set of certificates or keys, please consult the relevant documentation.

Next, we can add and commit generated keys and certificates:

git add keys-generated

git commit -m 'production: adding generated keys and certificates'

[my-production-setup fd8a397] production: adding generated keys and certificates
 6 files changed, 108 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 production/keys-generated/certs/api-gateway/cert.crt
 create mode 100644 production/keys-generated/certs/api-gateway/private.key
 create mode 100644 production/keys-generated/certs/server.crt
 create mode 100644 production/keys-generated/certs/storage-proxy/cert.crt
 create mode 100644 production/keys-generated/certs/storage-proxy/private.key
 create mode 100644 production/keys-generated/keys/deviceauth/private.key
 create mode 100644 production/keys-generated/keys/useradm/private.key

The API Gateway and Storage Proxy certificates generated here need to be made available to the Mender client. Consult the section on building for production for a description on how to include the certificates in the client builds.

Encrypting keys (optional)

A simple method for encrypting keys is to use the GNU Privacy Guard tool. Instead of committing plaintext keys to the repository, we will tar and encrypt the entire keys-generated directory structure, then commit it to the repository as a single binary blob.

The entire directory structure can be encrypted with the following command:

tar c keys-generated |  gpg --output keys-generated.tar.gpg --symmetric
Enter passphrase:

rm -rf keys-generated

ls -l

total 20
drwxrwxr-x. 1 user group 4096 01-30 11:08 config
-rw-rw-r--. 1 user group 5094 01-30 11:24 keys-generated.tar.gpg
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 user group  173 01-27 14:16 run

Keys need to be decrypted before bringing the whole environment up:

gpg --decrypt keys-generated.tar.gpg | tar xvf -
gpg: AES encrypted data
Enter passphrase:

When using encryption, commit keys-generated.tar.gpg instead of the keys-generated directory structure to the repository, like this:

git add keys-generated.tar.gpg

git commit -m 'production: adding generated keys and certificates'

[my-production-setup 237af44] production: adding generated keys and certificates
 1 file changed, 111 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 production/keys-generated.tar.gpg

Persistent storage

Persistent storage of backend services' data is implemented using named Docker volumes. The template is configured to mount the following volumes:

• mender-artifacts - artifact objects storage
• mender-db - mender services databases data

Create these volumes with the following commands:

docker volume create --name=mender-artifacts
docker volume create --name=mender-db

Configuration

The deployment configuration in config/prod.yml now needs to be updated.

Minio

The keys MINIO_ACCESS_KEY and MINIO_SECRET_KEY control credentials for uploading artifacts into the object store. Since Minio is a S3 API compatible service, these settings correspond to Amazon's AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key respectively.

First, generate a secret key for Minio with the pwgen utility:

MINIO_SECRET_KEY_GENERATED=$(pwgen 16 1) && echo $MINIO_SECRET_KEY_GENERATED

ahshagheeD1ooPae

Insert the access and secret keys into config/prod.yml with the following commands:

sed -i.bak "s/MINIO_ACCESS_KEY:.*/MINIO_ACCESS_KEY: mender-deployments/g" config/prod.yml
sed -i.bak "s/MINIO_SECRET_KEY:.*/MINIO_SECRET_KEY: $MINIO_SECRET_KEY_GENERATED/g" config/prod.yml

The updated entry should look similar to this, you can verify with git diff:

    ...
    minio:
        environment:
            # access key
            MINIO_ACCESS_KEY: mender-deployments
            # secret
            MINIO_SECRET_KEY: ahshagheeD1ooPae
    ...

Deployments service

The deployments service will upload artifact objects to minio storage via storage-proxy, see the administration overview for more details. For this reason, access credentials DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_KEY and DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_SECRET need to be updated and DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_URI must point to the domain name of your Storage proxy.

Run the following commands to set DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_KEY and DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_SECRET to the values of MINIO_ACCESS_KEY and MINIO_SECRET_KEY, respectively.

sed -i.bak "s/DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_KEY:.*/DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_KEY: mender-deployments/g" config/prod.yml
sed -i.bak "s/DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_SECRET:.*/DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_SECRET: $MINIO_SECRET_KEY_GENERATED/g" config/prod.yml

Also, run the following command so DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_URI points to your Storage proxy (including the right port, 9000 by default):

sed -i.bak "s/https:\/\/set-my-alias-here.com/https:\/\/$STORAGE_PROXY_DOMAIN_NAME:9000/g" config/prod.yml

After these three commands, the updated entry should look like this (you can again verify with git diff):

    ...
    mender-deployments:
        ...
        environment:
            DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_KEY: mender-deployments
            DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_AUTH_SECRET: ahshagheeD1ooPae
            DEPLOYMENTS_AWS_URI: https://mender.example.com:9000
    ...

Storage proxy

Add your storage server's DNS name under the key networks.mender.aliases key by running the following command:

sed -i.bak "s/set-my-alias-here.com/$STORAGE_PROXY_DOMAIN_NAME/g" config/prod.yml

The entry should now look like this:

    ...
    storage-proxy:
        networks:
            mender:
                aliases:
                    - mender.example.com
    ...

You can also change the values for DOWNLOAD_SPEED and MAX_CONNECTIONS. See the section on bandwidth for more details on these settings.

API gateway

For security purposes, the API Gateway must know precisely the DNS name allocated to it, which you'll configure via the ALLOWED_HOSTS environment variable.

Change the placeholder value my-gateway-dns-name to a valid hostname, by running the following command:

sed -i.bak "s/my-gateway-dns-name/$API_GATEWAY_DOMAIN_NAME/g" config/prod.yml

The updated entry should look like this:

    ...
    mender-api-gateway:
        ...
        environment:
            ALLOWED_HOSTS: mender.example.com
    ...

Note that if for some reason you need more than 1 DNS name pointing to the gateway, you can supply a whitespace-separated list of hostnames as follows:

    ...
    mender-api-gateway:
        ...
        environment:
            ALLOWED_HOSTS: mender.example.com mender2.example.com
    ...

Logging

The setup uses Docker's default json-file logging driver, which exposes two important log rotation parameters: max-file and max-size. For selected services - consistently producing a large amount of logs - we override these settings to ensure that at any given time, logs capture about 1 week of a running system's operation.

The reference setup used for determining these parameters (max-file: 10, max-size: 50m) was 200 devices, polling the server every 30 minutes. The total log volume produced was 2.4GB, and this is the recommended amount of disk space to reserve for logging purposes alone.

These parameters can however be adjusted accordingly to a particular deployment and workload. The deciding factors determining the log volume are:

• the number of devices accessing the system.
• polling frequency

It is suggested to adjust log rotation parameters only after measuring the actual space usage for a given use case.

Saving the configuration

Once all the configuration is complete, commit all changes to the repository:

git add config/prod.yml

git commit -m 'production: configuration'

At this point your commit history should look as follows:

git log --oneline 2.4.1..HEAD

7a4de3c production: configuration
41273f7 production: adding generated keys and certificates
5ad6528 production: initial template

Open Source

This section deals specifically with setting up an Open Source server. If you are setting up an Enterprise server, please proceed to the Enterprise section.

Bring up the Open Source server

Bring up all services up in detached mode with the following command:

./run up -d

Creating network "menderproduction_mender" with the default driver
Creating menderproduction_mender-mongo_1
Creating menderproduction_mender-gui_1
Creating menderproduction_minio_1
Creating menderproduction_mender-device-auth_1
Creating menderproduction_mender-inventory_1
Creating menderproduction_storage-proxy_1
Creating menderproduction_mender-useradm_1
Creating menderproduction_mender-deployments_1
Creating menderproduction_mender-api-gateway_1

Creating the first user

Since this is a brand new installation we need to create the initial user via the CLI provided by the User Administration Service. The service's binary is embedded in a Docker container, so to execute it you will issue the exec subcommand of docker-compose, e.g.:

./run exec mender-useradm /usr/bin/useradm create-user --username=myusername@host.com --password=mysecretpassword

The next sections deal with installation of an Enterprise server. If you are installing an Open Source server, please proceed to verification now.

Enterprise

This section will go through setting up the Enterprise features of the Mender server. If you are using the Open Source edition of the Mender server, you can skip ahead to the verification.

Configuring Enterprise

Once the Open Source parts of the configuration have been completed, you should have a fully functional server setup, except that it has not been launched yet. It is now time to configure the Enterprise specific features before bringing the server up.

Copy the enterprise.yml.template file to its production location, enterprise.yml:

cp config/enterprise.yml.template config/enterprise.yml

Creating the enterprise.yml file enables the Enterprise Mender server.

Bring up the Enterprise server

First log in to the Mender docker registry with your Mender Enterprise credentials:

docker login registry.mender.io

Bring up all services up in detached mode with the following command:

./run up -d

Creating menderproduction_mender-api-gateway_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-create-artifact-worker_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-deployments_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-device-auth_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-gui_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-inventory_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-mongo_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-tenantadm_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-useradm_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-workflows-server_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_mender-workflows-worker_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_minio_1 ... done
Creating menderproduction_storage-proxy_1 ... done

Note that even though this launches the Enterprise backend services, the Mender Enterprise server is not fully functional yet.

Multi tenancy

Multi tenancy is a feature of Mender where users can be divided into "organizations" (also sometimes called "tenants"). Each organization is confined and can not see or influence the data of other organizations. This can be used for example to give two different product teams access to the Mender service, without them seeing each others data, as well as isolating devices and users in test and production environments.

When using Mender Enterprise, multi tenancy is automatically enabled, and it cannot be turned off. Below follows a guide for setting up a single organization. For additional information on administering organizations, see the help screen from:

./run exec mender-tenantadm /usr/bin/tenantadm --help

Creating the first organization and user

In either case, at least one organization must be created when first installing the service. Execute this command in the production directory.

Replace the organization name, username and password with desired values and run this command:

TENANT_ID=$(./run exec mender-tenantadm /usr/bin/tenantadm create-org --name=MyOrganization --username=myusername@host.com --password=mysecretpassword | tr -d '\r') && (echo $TENANT_ID)

Make sure to save the tenant ID that appears after calling the command (which will also be in the TENANT_ID shell variable). This will be the identifier for the first organization. Creating additional organizations works exactly the same way, so the above step may be repeated multiple times.

Fetching the tenant token

Now we need to fetch the tenant token for the new organization. This is available in the JSON output from the get-tenant command, in the tenant_token field. To avoid manually parsing raw JSON, we can use the jq tool:

TENANT_TOKEN=$(./run exec mender-tenantadm /usr/bin/tenantadm get-tenant --id $TENANT_ID | jq -r .tenant_token) && (echo $TENANT_TOKEN)

where $TENANT_ID is the ID that was printed by the previous command. The output tenant token should be a long string like this:

eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJtZW5kZXIudGVuYW50IjoiNWQ4MzM1MzJkMTMwNTgwMDI4NDhmZmRmIiwia
XNzIjoiTWVuZGVyIiwic3ViIjoiNWQ4MzM1MzJkMTMwNTgwMDI4NDhmZmRmIn0.HJDGHzqZqbosAYyJpSIEeL0W4HMiOmb15ETnu
ChxE0i7ahW49dZZlQNJBKLkLzuESDxXnmQbQwsSGP6t32pGkeHVXTPjrSjhtMPC80NiibNG3f-QATw9I8YgG2SBd5xaKl17qdta1
nGi80T2UKrwlzqLHR7wNed10ss3NgJDIDvrm89XO0Rg6jpFZsHCPyyK1c8-Vn8zZjW5azZLNSgtgSLSmFQguQLRRXL2x12VEcmez
tFY0kJnhGtN07CD3XXxcz0BpWbevDYOPOEUusGd2KpLK2Y4QU8RdngqNtRe7SppG0fn6m6tKiifrPDAv_THCEG6dvpMHyIM77vGI
PwvV4ABGhZKRAlDe1R4csJQIbhVcTWMGcoZ4bKH-zDK0900_wWM53i9rkgNFDM470i6-d1oqfaCPcbiniKsq1HcJRZsIVNJ1edDo
vhQ6IbffPRCw-Au_GlnPTn_czovJqSa3bgwrJguYRIKJGWhHgx0e3j795oJ08ks2Mp3Rshbv4da

Make sure that the string does not include any spaces or newlines when you copy it from the terminal. The tenant token will be used in the following sections.

You can repeat the steps if you would like to isolate devices into multiple organizations.

Installing the tenant token

The tenant token needs to be included in the client configuration of each device that is going to be managed by Mender. Exactly how to include the token depends on which integration method is used with the client. Please refer to one of these sections:

• Migrating existing clients from an Open Source to an Enterprise server
• Mender installed on device using a deb package
• Device integration using Yocto Project
• Device integration with Debian Family
• Modifying an existing prebuilt image

Saving the Enterprise configuration

Once the Enterprise configuration is complete, commit all changes to the repository:

git add config/enterprise.yml

git commit -m 'production: Enterprise configuration'

At this point your commit history should look as follows:

git log --oneline 2.4.1..HEAD

76b3d00 production: Enterprise configuration
7a4de3c production: configuration
41273f7 production: adding generated keys and certificates
5ad6528 production: initial template

Verification

To verify that the services are running, execute the following command and verify that the state of all services is "Up":

./run ps

Below you can see typical output for the Enterprise server. The Open Source server will be similar, but will have fewer services running.

                      Name                                    Command                  State                  Ports
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
menderproduction_mender-api-gateway_1              /entrypoint.sh                   Up             0.0.0.0:443->443/tcp, 80/tcp
menderproduction_mender-create-artifact-worker_1   /usr/bin/workflows --confi ...   Up             8080/tcp
menderproduction_mender-deployments_1              /entrypoint.sh --config /e ...   Up             8080/tcp
menderproduction_mender-device-auth_1              /usr/bin/deviceauth --conf ...   Up             8080/tcp
menderproduction_mender-gui_1                      /entrypoint.sh nginx             Up (healthy)   80/tcp
menderproduction_mender-inventory_1                /usr/bin/inventory --confi ...   Up             8080/tcp
menderproduction_mender-mongo_1                    docker-entrypoint.sh mongod      Up             27017/tcp
menderproduction_mender-useradm_1                  /usr/bin/useradm --config  ...   Up             8080/tcp
menderproduction_mender-workflows-server_1         /usr/bin/workflows --confi ...   Up             8080/tcp
menderproduction_mender-workflows-worker_1         /usr/bin/workflows --confi ...   Up
menderproduction_minio_1                           /usr/bin/docker-entrypoint ...   Up (healthy)   9000/tcp
menderproduction_storage-proxy_1                   /usr/local/openresty/bin/o ...   Up             0.0.0.0:9000->9000/tcp

At this point you can try to log into the Web UI using the URL of your server, and the username and password that was created earlier.

If you encounter any issues while starting or running your Mender Server, you can take a look at the section for troubleshooting Mender Server.