Both Debian and Ubuntu make it really simple to get a server up and running. I was trying a few different Machine Images on Amazon and I found myself repeating a lot of things so I wanted to put them here for reference for those who might find it useful.

With a fresh image, the first thing to do is update apt-get.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

Then grab all of the software to use.

apt-get install -y xfsprogs mysql-server  apache2  libapache2-mod-python  python-mysqldb  python-imaging  python-django  subversion php5  phpmyadmin

xfsprogs is for formatting an Elastic Block Store volume and may not be needed in all cases.

I like to check out the latest version of Django from their repository, it makes it easier to update it later. This also starts a project named myproject (this name is used later).

cd /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/django django
ln -s /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py /usr/local/bin
cd /var/www
django-admin.py startproject myproject

Now to edit the apache config to tell it about our project.

cd /etc/apache2
nano httpd.conf

Add the following to set up python to run the django files and php to run the phpmyadmin files. There is also an example of serving static files. Change where it says myproject if you used a different name.

<Location "/">
    SetHandler python-program
    PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
    SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE myproject.settings
    PythonOption django.root /myproject
    PythonDebug On
    PythonPath "['/var/www'] + sys.path"
</Location>
 
 
Alias /adm_media/ /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/
<Location "/adm_media/">
    SetHandler None
</Location>
 
Alias /files/ /var/www/myproject/files/
<Location "/files/">
    SetHandler None
</Location>
 
Alias /phpmyadmin/ /usr/share/phpmyadmin/
<Location "/phpmyadmin/">
    SetHandler None
</Location>

Restart apache for it to use the new configuration.

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The only thing left to do is set up the database. If Ubuntu had you set up a root password already, add -p to the end of the following command to use it.

mysql

There are some users in mysql without username, it is best to remove those.

drop user ''@'localhost';

Do that for each host that has a blank username. Use the following to see all users.

SELECT user, host FROM mysql.user;

Create a database and add a user.

CREATE DATABASE db_name;
GRANT ALL ON db_name.* to user_name WITH GRANT OPTION;
SET PASSWORD FOR user_name = password('psswdhere');

If root doesn’t have a password yet, use the above commant with root as the username.

Amazon has a page about
how to use EBS with MySQL, but
there are reported issues with using Debian Lenny and EBS.

I ran into some trouble with python2.4 and the django code I was using. The previous server had 2.5 and I didn’t notice any problems, so I tried upgrading to 2.5 and changing which version of python Debian uses as default (this was on Debian Etch). I was having some difficulty getting a few of the site-packages to work with 2.5 by default (like mod_python), so I decided to move to Debian Lenny even though it isn’t as supported. While doing that I ran into a problem where it doesn’t work well with xfs and Amazon’s Elastic Block Store. They are looking into the matter, but while trying to figure that out, I realized that AWS doesn’t come with support. There is an extra package you have to purchase which starts at $100 a month.

That made Amazon look less awesome since I know I am going to need some support at some point. I decided to compare prices and features around again. I ended up revisiting Slicehost since I knew a lot more about setting up a server than I did before.

I posted the steps that I took to set up apache, mysql, django, and a few other things on a clean ubuntu machine on Code Spatter.

Now I have a WebFaction account for testing and subversion hosting and I’m using the Slicehost account for the live version of the site.

Subversion makes it easy to commit on one server and update on the other once it is stable. I should explore a distributed version control system like git since it might help out with this in the future.

Update October 21, 2008

The AWS developer community seems to be a good alternative to having direct support from amazon. The people there are knowledgeable and amazon reps post frequently. Here is a quote from someone at amazon about the issue I was having

We are still investigating the issue and will post an analysis a little later and a workaround.  Basically the problem revolves around the interaction between very specific kernel versions, XFS and our version of Xen.

Even though my slice is running fine, I will still be keeping AWS in mind.

Update May 7, 2009

Some people have posted some solutions on the developer community. I haven’t tested them, but I will look into it if I need to use Amazon again.

At a large institution like UCF, it is good to have a plan for emergencies. I set up a simple form that will update the main page at http://ucf.edu in an emergency so that important information can be realeased as fast as possible.

The main page is an html file that is copied every few minutes from our database driven application. This speeds up the website and cuts down on processor utilization considerably. A simple update to our cron job was added that checks if the site is in emergency mode and pulls from our other emergency page. This emergency page is created with a simple form and simple template file.

I created this page updater to be reliable and simple so that there is little turn arround time from emergency situation to information available. The form edits files in the filesystem instead of using a database that would require more complexity. There is a place to update the important information. That info is then put into the pre-built template when the user hits preview. Once the user is satisfied with the way it looks, there is a button to enable/disable the page. It updates the status that the cron job looks for and the main page will change in under a minute.