Ripen

If you web development machine is a fruit, Ripen is the thing that makes it not so green, and maybe a little soft, and kind of sweet. If your web development machine is not a fruit, you may have other issues.

In different words, Ripen is a bash script that helps you go from an empty Debian/Ubuntu machine to a working web development or production environment, per your configuration.

Requirements & Assumptions

I assume the following in getting this script to work properly:

• You are running Ubuntu 14.04. This comes with Bash 4.3. If you're using an earlier version of Ubuntu, you should have Bash 4 installed.
• You have installed openssh-server and are able to login to your server via SSH.
• You login to your server and run this command as the root user. In other words, you have administrative rights over the server and are running as a user which those rights.

While it is possible the script will still work if you stray from these assumptions, your mileage may vary.

Note: If you've had success or failures on other operating systems, please let me know. It may be easy to tweak for expanded support.

We're not doing much heavy lifting here. A machine with 2GB of RAM should be more than enough to get up and running. Plus, one option is to add a swapfile to your system.

Running the Script

First, you'll want to download the config file so you can change it per your settings. You can do this from anywhere on the machine, but probably best to just stay in your root user's home directory.

Again, note we assume you are logged in as the root user.

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rocktree/ripen/master/ripen.conf

Open this file and edit to your preferences. I use vim, but you can use any editor you prefer.

See the next section for configuration options.

$ vim ripen.conf

Once you're ready, save and close and we can run the script. We can run the script directly from the url. All you need to ensure is you are in the same directory as ripen.conf.

$ bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rocktree/ripen/master/ripen)

Now, wait and watch.

When it finishes, if it went smoothly, DELETE YOUR CONFIG FILE (it has sensitive data in it). If you ran into an exception, report it.

Configuration Options

We have lots of options you can configure to make the results meet your needs (which is the whole point of this thing).

If you don't see an option you'd like, or either create a new issue with the feature request, or contribute to the project.

Here are the options, broken up by action block.

System Updates

• update_system: (default: true) Run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. Before adding packages to Ubuntu, it's good to update the system.
• reboot: (default: true) Automatically restart the server upon finishing the task, which is usually required depending on what you updated and which packages/programs you've added.

Development Libraries

• dev_libs: Development libraries to install. It is highly recommended you just install all these libraries. But you can add others or leave this be if you'd like.

User Account

• add_user: (default: true) Add a new user to the system.
• user: The user's attributes
  • username: (default: burtmacklin) Username of the new user.
  • password: (default: password) The unencrypted password of the new user.
  • options: (default: '--create-home --user-group --shell /bin/bash'): Add options to the useradd command. Learn more.
  • sudo: (default: true): Grant the new user full root level permissions.
• username: (default: burtmacklin) The non-root, sudo user where we should install some of our packages.

IMPORTANT: If you choose false for user[sudo] then your username needs to be a user with root permissions. Otherwise, ensure the usernames match.

Bash Config

You probably want to add your own bash config, especially if you are creating a new user. We give you the option to set the config file you want to use.

• bash_config_file: (default: bashrc) The file your user uses for bash configuration.
• adjust_bash_config: (default: true) Replace the current bash config.
• bash_config_url: (default: dotfiles/bashrc in this repo) A fully- qualified URL from which to pull the bash config. Needs to be a plain text file.
• add_bash_profile: (default: true) Adds a .profile file in your user's home directory which autoloads the .bashrc file. Only use this if you are replacing .bashrc.
• bash_profile_url: (default: dotfiles/profile in this repo) A fully- qualified URL from which to pull for the .profile file. Needs to be a plain text file.

Git

• install_git: (default: true) Install Git.
• git: Attribute of the Git user.
  • name: (default: My Server) Name of the Git user.
  • email: (default: myserver@example.com) Email of the Git user.
  • colors: (default: true) Color the Git output.

Nginx

• install_nginx: (default: true) Install Nginx. This doesn't configure anything, but will start the nginx server.

MySQL

• install_mysql: (default: true) Install MySQL server.
• mysql: MySQL root user attributes.
  • root_password: (default: password) Password for root user.

PostgreSQL

• install_postgresql: (default: true) Install PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL comes with a postgres user out of the box and can be accessed and adjust from there. It also automatically starts the PostgreSQL server.

Ruby

At this time, this script only supports installing Ruby via rbenv. If you'd rather use rvm, then you should set this installation to false and install rvm manually (or you can contribute to this script!).

• install_rbenv: (default: true) Install Ruby via rbenv
• ruby_version: (default: 2.1.4) The version of Ruby to install. We're going to start with just one installation of ruby. Ignore if install_rbenv is false.
• install_bundler: (default: true) Install Bundler once rbenv and ruby are ready. Ignore if install_rbenv is false.

Swapfile

A swapfile can supplement your RAM by dedicating hard disk space to virtual memory. The commands here follow [this process](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on- ubuntu-14-04).

• add_swapfile: (default: true) Add a swapfile. **It's important you ensure you don't already have a swapfile by running swapon -s.
• swapfile: Swapfile attributes
  • size: (default: 4G) The amount of disk space to dedicate to the swapfile.
  • swappiness: (default: 10) The swappiness of the system. The closer to 0, the less likely the kernel is to use swap space unless necessary.
  • vfs_cache_pressure: (default: 50) From Digital Ocean, "This setting configures how much the system will choose to cache inode and dentry information over other data."

Contribution Guidelines

The script is quite simple, and adding features is really easy.

The script itself contains helpers and self-sustained sections. Every section needs to be toggleable via an option. And each section needs to function autonomously and with all actions.

01: Add Options

First, add the options for the feature you are adding. You can see the standard that's being followed. Be sure to add comments explaining your option.

Note: If you added an associative array, you need to declare it in the script.

02: Add Actions

Add your commands in the script. Ensure they are toggleable via an option.

03: Test It

All you need to do to test is to spin up a new blank server (I use Digital Ocean). Run the script twice.

1. Run with only your action running.
2. Run with everything set to true.

04: Do The Git Thing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request