OpenBlock Cookbooks

This serves as a sample Chef deployment configuration to ease both development and deployments of OpenBlock projects. It uses Chef Solo for managing the installation, and Vagrant for preparing the virtual development environment.

Customazations

This project initializes the OpenBlock Demo project for Boston. To customize it, you may need to customize the following:

• Adding a Git submodule (e.g. openblock here) pointing to the OpenBlock project to be deployed
• Customizing cookbooks/app/receipes/default.rb to install any dependencies or configurations that is needed for the particular instance. Please consult the Chef documentation.
• Customize cookbooks/app/templates/default/settings.py.erb for the OpenBlock project.

Development

This project uses Vagrant to build a virtualized environment for OpenBlock that closely resembles the production environment. Running in a virtual mode reduces many of cross-compatibility concerns and insulates the host server from being corrupted by dependencies.

Please note that you can still edit files in your favorite editor using your favorite tools in the host system. Any changes made to the files will be immediately propograted to the virtual machine.

Initial Installation

Follow the Vagrant Get Started Guide to install VirtualBox and Vagrant.

Basically, once VirtualBox is installed, and already have RubyGems installed, you can run:

$ gem install vagrant
$ vagrant box add lucid32 http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box

Getting started

To bootstrap the full environment, you simple need to do the following:

$ # Check out the code
$ git clone git://github.com/notnoop/openblock-dev.git
$ cd openblock-dev
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

$ vagrant up
...... Takes a while to setup the virtual environment and install .....
...... all dependencies .....

$ vagrant ssh

# fast way
$ DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=obdemo.settings /srv/openblock/virtualenv/bin/django-admin.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

# more explicit way
# The project is installed in `/srv/openblock/src` with scripts in
# `/vagrant`

(virtual)$ # Set up virtual environment and settings
(virtual)$ source /vagrant/set_env

(virtual)$ # Now run Django commands as usual
(virtual)$ django-admin.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

In the browser go to http://localhost:9000 -- Please note the port being 9000, rather than 8000.

Please note that this sets up a project without any data. Please follow the OpenBlock instructions to initially seed the database.

Deployment

TODO: Work in progress, recipes for nginx, apache, mod_python are needed.

This project also eases the deployment to deployment server (This only works on Amazone Ubuntu AMI servers now).

Initial Steps

All you need is an Ubuntu EC2 running an official Ubuntu AMI, like AMI-add819c4. Go to http://aws.amazon.com and setup an instance.

Setting up Amazon EC2 with the proper security groups and key pairs is out-of-scope here (contributions are welcome!)

To ease development add the following to your ~/.ssh/config:

Host *.amazonaws.com
User ubuntu
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/amazonpair.pem

The IdentityFile should point to the SSH Key provided by Amazon, and HostName is the public DNS provided by Amazon

Getting started

Once you the machine is up, you can the following:

$ export OB_HOST="ec2-174-129-76-100.compute-1.amazonaws.com"

$ # Check out the code
$ git clone git://github.com/notnoop/openblock-dev.git
$ cd openblock-dev
$ git submodule update

$ # Deploy now!
$ ./deploy.sh $OB_HOST

Now you can go to your browser and access http://ec2-50-16-113-38.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ to see the latest installation.

You will still need to login to seed the data. Doing so requires.

$ ssh $OB_HOST
$ source ./chef/set_env

$ django-admin.py ... seed commands ...

TODO

• Make the server version production quality (e.g. logrotate, nginx, caching headers, etc)
• Check for proper file user permission, and allow having custom users (e.g. openblock)
• Enable Static Files