Saturday, December 8, 2012

Working with Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk

I decided to start using Amazon cloud services.

There is a pretty instresting solution Amazon Beastalk, which you should consider.

There is a lot of documentation, but as normal, there are always pseudo dark steps not thoroughly documented.

For intance, when you arrive to "Develop, Test, and Deploy" section of the "AWS Elastic Beanstalk" documentation, there is a step, name #1 quite obscure:


1.- From your Git repository directory, type the following command.
git aws.config

Nowhere it is told that you must previously 'set up your gir repository' as described here.

I also encountered what I think is a bug regarding timezones on Amazon's service, which was easily fixed. Following the README of the "AWS Command line tools". I got this error:


 $ elastic-beanstalk-describe-applications
Service returned an error.
Type: Sender
Code: RequestExpired
Message: Request has expired. Timestamp date: 2012-06-02T14:44:13-04:30

Strangely, this happened because I had my ubuntu virtual box configured to show time as in my timezone (-04:30), while the EC2 instance (at least that's we're I checked) showed in UTC format.

So I decided to change my locale to UTC

doing
 $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

I had to select "ETC", and then "UTC"...

Done that, the command "elastic-beanstalk-describe-applications" ran without problems. showing my applications.

Then I continued following the beanstalk documentation and did
git aws.config
git aws.push

The only problem I encountered after doing this is that I realized that Amazon Beanstalk doesn't support Git Submodules !! So I had to make a new directory, copy all my application there, do a new complete repository with all the code and push it to amazon. At first I was kind of reluctant to do this, but then I started to think that it was not that bad ... (I also didn't have other options : )

I realized that my app was configured to always redirect to https protocol (secure http) (this gave me a lot of headaches, because if Beanstalk is not configured to work with SSL then the Health Check URL didn't work at all because of the difference http/https... ). So I decided to buy a $13 SSL certificate from godaddy (they cost this if you click on their ad after a google search, not if you enter directy to godaddy).

I wanted to configure mydomain.com instead of www.mydomain.com, and also to use Amazon Route 53. This was not a problem with the current documentation at Amazon.









Friday, December 7, 2012

rsync over ssh with a private key

RSYNC is my favorite tool to sync two directories, either local or remotely.

Now I learned how to do it over ssh using a private key:

Thanks to Troy and this link: http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html

This is the command:

rsync -e "ssh -i /path/to/my/key.pem -l myuser" myremotehost:/remote/path/ localpath -iva

Easy peasy

Thursday, December 6, 2012

joomla white page in template after server migration/update // comparing packages

I changed servers mounted all the stuff and some of the Joomla sites I had opened correctly, others just showed a white page.

I didn't know why.

After many many failed attemps to fix it, god's hand enlightened me and I decided to compare the installed php packages between servers.

This can be done using
dpkg --get-selections | grep php

Comparing these packages between servers, it showed evidently I had missed installation of the package
php5-mcrypt

An apt-get install put my joomla sites running again.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

install LAMP - postgres - change data dir - ssh without password... all donde minuted in AWS Amazon Web Services

I just wanted to comment on how good Amazon Web Services are.

I had my server hosted with another provider, whose name I'm not going to say...

I was with them a lot of time, maybe 10 years. Upgraded my server a couple of times and all. One day my server went nuts and they wanted to charge me $99 dollars AN HOUR just to take a look and help me, no warranties.

So I decided it was time to migrate to a better service: Amazon AWS.

I was getting used to it while setting up the a webapp on Elastic Beanstalk, which is also an excellent service you should try if you have a big webapp you want to deploy. It has and all integration with git, so its all really easy. Using it was that I started understading the relationship between the different services:
EC2: the app servers
RDS: database servers
Route52: domain record management
CloudFront: asset delivery
etc...

Well, as I was saying I was urged to migrate from my old server.

I could set up a running new server in minutes. Maybe the most complicated stuff would be opening a new account and passing through the telephone validation.

So I wrote all this because I wanted to documents the command I did to install the LAMP+Postgres environment I needed. Also to change the datadir of mysql:

I decided to use an instance running Ubuntu.

commands (with sudo or as root):
apt-get update
apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql postgresql-client php5-pgsql

that get all I needed installed.

I had a snapshot of a volume I wanted to mount in the new server. So in Amazon's interface I select attach volume to xxxx instance. After that I had to modify mount the drive that appeared in /dev/xvdf with the command

mount /dev/xvdf /mnt

To make the change permanent I edited the file

/etc/fstab

and added the line

/dev/xvdf /mnt ext4 defaults 0 0

where /mnt is the mount point... the other options are googlable.

I also needed to change MySql's data directory. This was kind of tricky the first time I had to do it.

One needs to change /etc/mysql/my.cnf file find datadir options and change it to what one needs.

The restart mysql with

service mysql restart

But that't not all, it is necessaty to update ubuntu's apparmor file with

vim /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld

There you must find the old datadir path and change for the new one. Afterwards, reconfigure mysql with

dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-5.5

And then restart again mysql (I did this, I don't know if its absolutely necessary).

I also needed to log in to the server using classic user/password combination, so its necessary to edit sshd_config with

vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

There it is necessary to change the directive to

PasswordAuthentication yes

Finally I installed exim4 as an MTA

apt-get install exim4

and configured it with

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

I then chose a user to forward me root and postmaster mails. It is necessary to create a file in the user home

~/.forward

and the contents are the email address to which you wish to forward the emails.

that's it !

cancel script completely on ctrl-c

I found this question interesting: basically how to cancel completely a script and all child processes : You do this by creating a subro...