A New Image: A Bit Closer To Turnkey

Improved Image For Amazon EC2 Users

This instance is built from the Nuxeo EP 5.2.0.m4 distribution.
Great work to all the folks who contributed to it!

I have built a new version, for those that want to have something
closer to a “turnkey” image that they can run on amazon ec2. If you missed
my previous blog post, then you may want to go back to it and make sure
you have the proper background and understanding of amazon ec2.

The new image ami is:

ami-12997e7b

The major improvements with this AMI over the previous one (besides
running 5.2.0.m4):

• The jboss server has been locked down somewhat so it’s closer to
  something you can use without too much installation hassle. The most
  dangerous security problems have been dealt with. See
  /usr/local/nuxeo-ep-5.2.0.m4/banned for the removed parts
  of jboss and some more info. It’s probably not production ready, but the
  worst offenders have been removed.
• The tomcat acceleration (libtcnative1.so) has been
  installed so that serving static files is basically the same speed as a
  native apache.
• Data in the repostiory is stored in postgres.
• There is proper configuration and a script to help you boot your
  instance so that you use the “big” disk on an instance that is mounted
  on /mnt on amazon.
• The server is configured to run on port 80 and binds to all
  interfaces by default.

This is not to say it’s totally ready. There is still some work to do
before it’s truly “turnkey”:

• Jena is not putting its data into postgres. I tried a great many
  different things, but could not convince it to use postgres, so I fell
  back to using Derby for annotations and relations.
• No automatic backups to S3 to make sure the data is safe (but it
  seemed silly to bother until the problem with Jena + postgres gets
  fixed).

What to do to use it

The image is 64 bit and I recommend using a m1.large
image.

Once your image is booted, log into it as root and in your home
directory use this command:

./instance-start.sh

After that, it’ll take a bit to start up and you can see your instance
by hitting your server with a web browser on /nuxeo and have
fun!

Be sure to change your Administrator password!

Future restarts

The instance-start script does some things besides just start the
server. It initializes the instance filesystem and sets up some database
configuration that is needed to run nuxeo. After the first time, you
should use the normal run and shutdown scripts in
/usr/local/nuxeo-ep-5.2.0.m4/bin as is normal.

The script above tries to keep you from running it multiple times–this
will blow up because databases already exist and other such state–so it
is probably easier to just destroy the instance and try again.