Make installation process easier and quicker

[GUI]

The process for installing API Umbrella could use some improvement, to make it easier and quicker. The general plan is to offer self-contained RPMs and debs, so we have simple one-click installers for installing API Umbrella and all of it's dependencies.

Work has already started on this in the omnibus-api-umbrella. This uses the omnibus packaging system the opscode folks came up with to easily create self-contained package installers across different OSes. The package installer will install all the dependencies, and then there's some initial work on the config branch to introduce a single command line utility, api-umbrella-ctl that will run all the necessary dependencies on demand. The general idea is that once this work is done, running API Umbrella will be as simple as installing a package for your OS and then running something like api-umbrella-ctl start.

For a bit of background on why this has become an issue: the basic issue right now is that the installation process has become quite dependent on our custom Chef scripts. The main problems with this are that it requires users to use Chef (which obviously not everyone uses), they must use some of our custom Chef cookbooks (and how we need something like nginx configured may not jive with how someone else wants to install nginx on other systems Chef manages), and our cookbooks only target RHEL/CentOS 6. So while we can automate this for development purposes using our Vagrant setup, it's not ideal for people wanting to deploy this to different types of production environments. Plus, all of these changes should also make the Vagrant setup process go much faster, since everything will come bundled in the binary package installers.

Docker could also be a good candidate for simplifying this kind of thing, but that also places a dependency on Docker that I don't quite want to mandate (because again, not everyone uses it). However, we could certainly offer Docker images of API Umbrella in addition to the packages pretty easily once once we get all this sorted out.

[brylie]

+1 for Debian 7 and/or Ubuntu 14.04 .deb packaging :)

[perfaram]

👍 for installation with Docker, as it works under any OS (and Docker images are incredibly handy)

[brylie]

Omnibus, docker, vagrant, capistrano, puppet, grunt, etc. all present the user with similar difficulty. See: #40, #33, #26, #20

OS native packaging, or even a shell script, would provide a solid foundation -- and would not prohibit the use of other packaging solutions.

[GUI]

I'm very sorry for the delay on responding to these different installation issues. OS native packages should be available this weekend for CentOS 6.5, CentOS 7.0, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, and Debian 7. That should hopefully finally resolve a lot of these issues. We will likely only have 64bit packages available. Let me know if anyone else has any other OS systems they'd like packages for, or if 32bit support is desired.

[brylie]

Thank you! :-)

[rrobertorr]

Any updates regarding the native OS packages? Thanks!

[GUI]

I'm just wrapping up the various builds. All the packages should be uploaded and available in a few hours. Sorry again for all the delays! But we're almost there (finally).

[rrobertorr]

That's great to hear!

[GUI]

The binary packages are now available for download: http://nrel.github.io/api-umbrella/download/

I hope this will make it a lot easier for everyone wanting to try API Umbrella out (this is also what we're now using internally, so we should have clear upgrade paths for future updates). I realize we still have a ways to go in better documenting this open source project, so please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions or you run into any issues. Thanks for everyone's patience!

[brylie]

There is a pull request open with a Dockerfile.