Installation

Installing PlatformLayer

Now that HP has opened up their OpenStack beta, it's easy to try out PlatformLayer.

Suggestion: Before you start setting up PlatformLayer, sign up first. I don't know how long the approval delay can be.

I'll walk through downloading PlatformLayer & getting it running.

Here are the commands (I tried them out an fresh Oneiric instance):

Installation

# Install maven, if it's not already present
which mvn || sudo apt-get install maven2

# Install Git, Java, Postgres
sudo apt-get install git openjdk-6-jdk postgresql

# Clone platformlayer into ~/platformlayer
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/platformlayer/platformlayer.git
cd platformlayer


# Download and build other source code and maven dependencies we need
# Most notably, the OpenStack Java bindings
./bin/install-prereqs.sh

# Build PlatformLayer itself
./bin/install-build.sh

# Create DB
# This needs to be sudo because it creates the database as the postgres user
# It's a very simple script - please audit it!
sudo ./bin/install-db.sh 

Starting it all up

# Start all the services
# This automatically tails the logs, which are a little verbose..
bin/start.sh

Trying it out

# Now (finally) you can run the PlatformLayer command-line client...
bin/pl
# Should output:
# Command not found / known.  Valid commands:
#        put-item
#        get-endpoint
# ...

Create a PlatformLayer User

# Your username will be the same as your logged-in user name
# Your password will be secret
USERNAME=`whoami`
PASSWORD="secret"

# Create a configuration file in ~/.credentials/platformlayer
bin/build-credentials.sh platformlayer "${USER}" "${PASSWORD}"

# Now create the user
# This writes direct to the DB, as configured in the ~/.credentials/ file
bin/ks create-user ${USERNAME} "${PASSWORD}"
bin/ks create-project platformlayer

# Check that the platformlayer project is there
bin/ks list-projects ${USERNAME}
# Should output:
# platformlayer

# Check that PlatformLayer is listening
bin/pl list-services
# Should output, amongst a flood of debug output
#  openstackCloud
#  openstackPublicEndpoint
#  openstackInstance
#  memcacheServer
# ...

# Stop tailing the logs
pkill tail

# Try it again, without the log verbosity
bin/pl list-services
# Note that many of the services listed are experimental!!

Great! Now try MemcacheAAS