Rundeck Email using AWS SES

Overview

At Pindrop we use Rundeck to manage a lot of our operational toil. Rundeck has the option to send email when jobs are complete. We have Amazon’s Simple Email Service configured to send email as a trusted authority from Pindrop email accounts. Getting this configured in Rundeck was non-obvious, so I wanted to write a small article about what it takes to get this working.

Requirements

First you must configure AWS SES properly. That’s outside of the scope of this post, but generally you’ll need to set up some DNS records that prove you own the domain, and request a service limit increase from AWS Support to be able to actually send out email.

You’ll need to get a username/password using the Create My SMTP Credentials button in the AWS SES console under the SMTP Settings tab.

Then you’ll need to configure Rundeck, which will probably require some changes to get things working.

Configuring Rundeck

Rundeck configuration /etc/rundeck/rundeck-config.conf is by default a conf file. This is all well and good until you need to do something fancy, like configure advanced SMTP stuff. To do this you’ll need to convert your config file to a groovy config file.

Groovy Config

There are a couple of differences between the groovy and the conf file format. The foremost is that you must quote all strings on the right side of the =. This means you’ll do the following, which is pretty simple:

Original

loglevel.default = INFO

Groovy

loglevel.default = "INFO"

Additionally, if you have any arrays you’re indexing, you will need to quote them, again, an example is the best help here. Note that both the 1 and the assigned values are quoted now.

Original

rundeck.storage.provider.1.type = db
rundeck.storage.provider.1.path = /keys

Groovy

rundeck.storage.provider."1".type = "db"
rundeck.storage.provider."1".path = "/keys"

You’ll also need to set up rundeck to use your new groovy config file. To do this, edit /etc/default/rundeckd and add export RDECK_CONFIG_FILE=/etc/rundeck/rundeck-config.groovy.

Start up Rundeck and make sure it’s happy with the configuration.

Configuring SES (via Grails) in Rundeck

Rundeck uses Grails and conveniently uses the grail configuration for email sending too. Now that we’ve switched to a groovy format for our config file, we can add a new grails block. Use the following template and put it in your rundeck-config.groovy (replacing values as appropriate, like username/password/source address/aws region).

grails {
    mail {
        "default" {
            from = "rundeck@your_organization.com"
        }
        host = "email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com"
        port = 587
        username = "${SMTP_USERNAME}"
        password = "${SMTP_PASSWORD}"
        props = ["mail.smtp.starttls.enable":"true",
                 "mail.smtp.port":"587"]
    }
}

Finally restart Rundeck and create a job to send a test email, hopefully you’re good to go!