How do you maintain the manual setup of Drupal installation? - amazon-web-services

I have set up an elastic beanstalk deployment of Drupal to host a Drupal built website.
When I start up my ec2 instance, I go through the installation steps of setting up Drupal.
However, when the instance is Restarted, or Stopped, restarting the instance goes back to this page!
How can I configure the instance so that these installation steps do not need to be repeated even when the instance goes down. This is quite worrying as I am looking to host my website this way.
Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated!

This step means that drupal can't find database or it can find it but installation is not done yet (required tables are not created). So if you pass installation and you see again this screen it can mean 2 things:
Your database configuration is lost, so drupal can't find DB.
DB configuration file is ok, but DB it self is lost so configuration must be done again.
So first check what is the problem in your case and then solve it. Probably since you are installing in instance, DB configuration is then recorded and then lost when your box expires. If so...find a way to make permanent change do config file (should be /sites/default/settings.php).

Related

Google Cloud VM Files Deleted after session disconnect

I am having some of my GCP instances behave in a way similar to what is described in the below link:
Google Cloud VM Files Deleted after Restart
The session gets disconnected after a small duration of inactivity at times. On reconnecting, the machine is as if it is freshly installed. (Not on restarts as in the above link). All the files are gone.
As you can see in the attachment, it is creating the profile directory fresh when the session is reconnected. Also, none of the installations I have made are there. Everything is lost including the root installations. Fortunately, I have been logging all my commands and file set ups manually on my client. So, nothing is lost, but I would like to know what is happening and resolve this for good.
This has now happened a few times.
A point to note is that if I get a clean exit, like if I properly logout or exit from the ssh, I get the machine back as I have left, when I reconnect. The issue is there only when the session disconnects itself. There have been instances where the session disconnected and I was able to connect back as well.
The issue is not there on all my VMs.
From the suggestions from the link I have posted above:
I am not connected to the cloud shell. i am taking ssh of the machine using the chrome extension
Have not manually mounted any disks (afaik)
I have checked the logs from gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output --zone us-east4-c INSTANCE_NAME. I could not really make much of it. Is there anything I should look for specifically?
Any help is appreciated.
Please find the links to the logs as suggested by #W_B
Below is from 8th when the machine was restarted and files deleted
https://pastebin.com/NN5dvQMK
It happened again today. I didn't run the command immediately then. The below file is from afterwards though
https://pastebin.com/m5cgdLF6
The below one is after logout today.
[4]: https://pastebin.com/143NPatF
Please note that I have replaced the user id, system name and a lot of numeric values in general using regexp. So, there is a slight chance that the time and other values have changed. Not sure if that would be a problem.
I have added the screenshot of the current config from the UI
Using locally attached SDD seems to be the cause ... here it is explained:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd#data_persistence
You need to use a "persistent disk" - else it will behave just as you describe it.

Missing Jenkins Job Information

Recently I restarted my AWS instance and got a new IP address but after I restarted both Jenkins and AWS, the information about my previous jobs was no longer shown in Jenkins.
I checked the path and it still exists in the instance but it is not shown on the web. I tried to create another project and it still created in the same path just that only the newly created project is in. Any suggestions on how to recover my missing projects??
FYI
I have lots of old plugins that mentions "xxx failed to load" so I do not know if that is causing it.
one of my plugins does not match and all those that depends on it will fail to show on the installed section of the plugin. Thus I remove all the plugins by deleting it directly from the plugin folder and check for the working copy that was on my previous version and download the same version of plugins. After which, all the jobs come back on screen

Drupal on Elastic Beanstalk Redirects to Install.php on "eb deploy"

I am encountering what I believe to be permission issues when trying to deploy a Drupal application onto Elastic Beanstalk
I followed this tutorial to get Drupal up and running: http://comm-press.de/en/blog/drupal-climbs-aws-elastic-beanstalk
I am using a Postgres database and I am entering the correct credentials when filling out the forms on install.php, without error.
Any subsequent deploys after the initial deploy brings me back to install.php. After entering in my database information, I get this message, telling me Drupal is already installed (which it is).
http://i.imgur.com/N6KDvvo.png
Why does my site get redirected to install.php after 'eb deploy'? What permissions should I set my drupal folder such that settings.php and /sites/default/files is generated?
The install state is controlled by the DB-- if Drupal bootstraps with no DB information, you are routed to the code that asks you for it.
I was able to bypass this part by setting up a AWS RDS DB and connecting all instances to it.
--But, wait, there's more. Now that having all the instances reading from the same DB has squashed most of the concurrency problems between instances*. Go ahead, try and add a photo to your admin profile. I will wait. Yep, most of the time you'll get the wrong instance and the single image on one instance is not shown on all instances.
I am working on solving that problem with a start up & cron job script that loads updates to resources from the AWS S3 service.
Step A load code into S3
Step B set an accessible timestamp for $lastModified to now()
Step 1 wget/curl a timestamp of the last remote modification ($lastModified)
Step 2 compare the local last updated stamp ($lastUpdated) to remote last modified timestamp
Step 3 if ($lastModified == $lastUpdated) {die} else {update incremental changes && set $lastUpdated = $lastModified}
Watch that first incremental update, it's a doozy.
So... additionally I should mention that we are installing completely vanilla drupal when we instantiate an image, as part of the Docker file from drupal the drupal apache image the last thing the Docker file runs is a setup script.
Elastic Beanstalk sets Environment variables-- some of those variables are the amazon access key id and access secret key.
I curl an IP only available inside of Elastic Beanstalk curl -v 169.254.169.254
From that output in the setup script I can tell if I am local AWS EB or in AWS EB. That allows me to conditionally change certain configurations-- like connecting RDS or a local MySQL DB to Drupal.
The setup script uses aws cli to pull from S3 (sync) to add, replace, update everything in the webroot turning the instance into a setup Drupal installation as far as file level assets go.
sed and service reload is done a lot. Elasticache vs local Redis...
last we start the web server in the foreground && tail -f /dev/null so the container doesn't immediately close.
Drupal is just for static assets pages and a header/menu/footer wrapper for our web app (templates are served..., Twig/JS fills the template in with data). Authentication happens via API-- not even using 90% or so of the goodness in Drupal...
Incremental changes are pulled by comparing hash values and acting to run the update process if they are different.

Deploying WordPress on Elastic Beanstalk?

Suppose I create a site in Wordpress, which is running on Elastic Beanstalk. Now, on the running app I will create posts /pages, upload images, etc. That is, some data, videos, files and records in a database will be added to the running application.
3 questions:
If WordPress is running on Elastic Beanstalk with multiple Amazon EC2 instances actually running my WordPress install, then will those files propagate automatically to all running instances? And will this also happen, if a new EC2 instance is fired up - for example, to handle increased load?
From what I see in AWS console, I can deploy different versions of an app-- but as per scenario above, if I deploy a new version, wont I lose all the files uploaded directly into running app (i.e. files and database records)? How do I keep those and at the same time deploy a new version of my app?
The WordPress team keeps issuing upgrades. Can I directly upgrade my running WordPress install, through the web interface? Or do I have to first upgrade my local version of WordPress, and then upload the new version of the app to Beanstalk? If I have to upgrade my local version and then upload, then again I am back to point 1, i.e. changes made by users directly to the older version of running app. How do I preserve those changes?
I've been working on this as well, and have learned a couple of things that are relevant here -- your question about uploads in particular has been on my mind:
(1) The best way to handle uploads, it seems to me, is to either go the NFS/NAS route like you suggest, but one better than that is to use an Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress, so that any uploads automatically copy up to S3 and the URLs in your WordPress media library reflect the FQDN of your bucket and not your specific site. That way you could have one or ten WP nodes in your Beanstalk and media/images are independent of any one of those servers.
(2) You should absolutely be using RDS here. Few things are easier to work with and as stress-free as a Multi-AZ, reserved MySQL RDS instance. Either that or your own EC2 running MySQL that is independent of the Beanstalk, but why run that when RDS is so much easier?
(3) Yes you definitely have to commit changes to your Git repository or local file first (new plugins, changes to themes, WP upgrades) and then upload/install as a revision to the Beanstalk code. Otherwise, all the changes you make via the web interface to one node will never be in the new load for a new node -- in fact you'll have an upgraded database but an older set of code in the Beanstalk application, so it's likely to create errors of some kind or another.
I took an AWS architecture course, and their advice for EC2 and the Beanstalk is to start to think about server instances as very disposable -- so you should try to think about easy ways for your boxes to provision themselves in the bootstrapping process and to take over work for one another without any precious resources on just one box. So losing an instance should never be a big deal. (This is definitely not how we thought in the world of physical servers, where we got everything tweaked 'just so'.)
Good luck!
Well, I'm no expert, but since no one has answered, I'll give it my best shot.
You are absolutely right--kind of. While each EC2 instance does have some local storage, it is destroyed and reset with each new instance. Because of this, Amazon has things like Elastic Block Storage and S3 for persistent files. I don't know how one would configure WP to utilize this, but that will likely be the solution.
I think this problem is solved by my answer to #1. As for the database, all of your EC2 instances should be pulling from the same RDS location. Again, while you could have MySQL running on each EC2 instance, in the interest of persistence, having a separate database makes more sense.
You, again, have most everything right. Local development should always precede live deployment. Upgrading locally then pushing to the live servers will make sure all of your instances remain identical.
Truth-be-told, I am still in the process of learning all of this too, as I said, I'm not an expert. Hopefully someone else will come along and give a more informed answer. However, the key conceptual hurdle here is the idea of elastic scalability--and the salient point of this idea is the separation of elements between what is elastic/scalable/disposable and what is persistent.
Hopefully that helps.
I have deployed a small Wordpress site on EB, S3 and RDS. S3 holds all static data, such as media uploads. This works through a plugin. RDS holds the database. EB holds the latest deployed application. The application is deployed from my dev environment, with a build script. This way, I just have to press one button and I redeploy.
I wrote an article about it here: http://www.cortexcode.com/wordpress-to-aws-code-example/
While it was at first annoying to work with, the speed of AWS is nice and now it's easier than ever. It used to be that I had to upload a bunch of files over FTP, this is way more efficient. :-)
As an addition to all the great answers already:
1) I can highly recommend EFS but also S3 for media files, so they are served from high availability regions in combination with cloudfront. For Wordpress there is one plugin that really speeds up this ( not affiliated to them, just really like the plugin ). There is also an assets plugin, if you'd like to serve JS, CSS files from S3. For the EFS solution, take a look at the AWSlabs docs on git, and specifically this file on how they mount the uploads file.
In general, EBS is really great for Wordpress, but you'll need to think in a different mindset as compared to other hosting solutions ( shared hosting, managed hosting ).
OK I researched a lot on this particular issue, and this is what I learned--
(1) If a wordpress user uploads some files, then his files will be uploaded only to the virtual machine that is actually serving his request at that time. Eg if currently the wordpress site is cloud-deployed and is using 5 virtual machines, now when user makes request he is directed to one virtual machine-- the one with the lowest load at that point... His uploads are stored only on that server. Current Platform-as-a-service solutions (like Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and App Fog) do not have the ability to propagate the changes to all the running instances. Either that (propagate changes to all servers) or use a common storage by all running instances-- these are the only 2 solutions to this problem. (Eg of common storage would be all 5 running virtual machines using Network-Attached-Storage (NAS)... )
(2) With ref to platforms available currently like Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and App Fog, for example, even if user made changes directly to running app- these platforms rely on the local version of code (which the admin deployed initially to cloud)- and there is no way to update the local version of code (on admin's PC) with the changes made by a user to running app-- hence these changes viz, files are lost-- Similarly, changes in database by user to running app are also lost-- unless the admin is using exactly the same database for his local app (that he deployed to cloud)
(3) Any changes to running apps first have to be made to the local app on admin's PC and then pushed to cloud.
I am working on a Cloud PaaS that addresses all these concerns-- viz updates can be made to running apps, code changes made to running app are also updated in code repository accessible by user...The Proof of concept is ready, hopefully it will be as good as I hope it should be :) -- currently the only thing that is actually there is the website (anyacloudpanel.com) -- design work is going on :)
If there is some rule that I should not mention my website( Anya Cloud Panel) -- then I am sorry -- pls feel free to edit and remove my website URL from my answer :)
Thanks,
Arvind.
Deploying WordPress to AWS Elastic Beanstalk does require some change to the normal WordPress deployment as mentioned here a few times. To answer your questions, here is a great tutorial explaining stateless applications and how to deploy to Elastic Beanstalk:
Deploying WordPress to Amazon Web Services AWS EC2 and RDS via ElasticBeanstalk
Be careful if you use a theme from themeforest for example. Some of them are incompatible with wordpress S3 plugin. Then you're screwed, you can not deploy your wordpress on the cloud.

Coldfusion: Setting up a second website on CF8 Enterprise

Windows 2008 Server R2 64bit, ColdFusion8 Enterprise Edition (multi-server configuration), Plesk
Recently purchased dedicated hosting on Hostgator and set up a website with help from a server guy. I'm doing a second site on my own this time. I've successfully created the new site in plesk, pointed the domain etc, but now need to set up a new instance of ColdFusion for this new site and I'm not sure how to go about it. From my googling, I'm guessing it's simply a case of setting up a new "instance", which can be done via the coldfusion administrator. Is this correct? Is there anything else I need to know? Any gotchas waiting to bite me?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Well you don't need to set up a new CF instance for a new website: there's not a one-to-one relationship between the two ideas.
The minimum you really need to do is to set up the new website, in a directory within the CF application root, or within a CF-mapped directory if the dir is outside that root, and then run the web server connector (wsconfig.exe) to configure the website to pass requests for CF files to CF.
On a standard install, wsconfig.exe is located in the [coldfusion]/runtine/bin dir, and on a multiserver install it's in [JRun]/bin.
If you do add a new instance, you still need to run wsconfig to connect the website to the CF instance.
user460114, new instance == new "server", so when first instance crashes for some reason, second will still run because it uses separate heap space and lives it's own life.
You could use this for some other purpose like failover instance, or cluster, or staging instance. It's not needed in your case.
You need to need to make new directory in webroot, here's example:
C:\inetpub\www\old_site
C:\inetpub\www\new_site
And set new_domain.com to point to ..\new_site, and leave old_site.com point to ..\old_site.
Cheers