Using Project Mercury and your own site

Posted by iaminawe on September 24, 2009 at 7:43pm

Hi,

I was wondering if there is one consolidated set of instructions anywhere that deals with how to set your own drupal based site over the base pressflow site launched over your EC2 mercury instance?

Basically I would like to know more about the following steps.These seem to be covered in the www.getpantheon.com intro video but the section is sped up and very difficult to try and dissect to understand what is going on.

I have successfully launched a small instance running the Mercury AMI. I am able to login to pressflow and have root access via SSH to the EC2 box.

The steps I followed then was
1.) Install CVS & SVN
2.) Install ec2-api-tools
3.) Checkout my sites folder with SVN into the var/www folder
4.) Copy the cacherouter module from pressflow/sites/all/modules/ to my www/var/sites/folder
5.) Delete the pressflow sites folder and symlink in my sites folder in the directory above
6.) Copied in the correct settings.php information into this file in my sites/default/

I am busy working through this link http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1663 to try and connect a mysql db to an Elastic Block Storage so that I can connect to the database when restarting an instance.

What are the steps required to actually move all the files over to an EBS so that when an instance is shut down and restarted, it is possible to easily continue working with the set without reconfiguring each time?

I am fairly new to all this stuff so I was wondering if there is any existing documentation to make this process walkthrough a little clearer.

I am going to keep struggling along and will post any progress and problems here but any advice or instructions would be appreciated.

Thanks
Gregg

Comments

Pushing the envelope

Posted by joshk on September 24, 2009 at 11:02pm

At the moment you're pushing the envelope of what Project Mercury (or any of the PANTHEON images) support out of the box. They're all labeled "Alpha" for a reason! :)

However, a few notes:

You probably want to keep Pressflow as your base, or else you're going to miss out on a lot of the advantages of Varnish. Assuming you haven't hacked your core or anything, you can just get the sites/all directory from your project's SVN and put that in over pressflow. Alternatively, consider updated your whole project trunk to use Pressflow rather than stock Drupal.
Mouting and initializing an EB drive isn't very hard, nor is moving your data over there. Currently the boot script in /etc/mercury/init.sh moves mysql into the /mnt directory (which is where most of the included storage on the instance is). You can do the same for your preferred EB mount-point and update /etc/mysql/my.conf accordingly.
Automatically launching new instances with associated EBs is in the works, but is a little more complex.

Thanks for pushing the envelope, and feel free to let me know what other kinds of improvements you'd like to see.

https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com

Thanks

Posted by iaminawe on September 25, 2009 at 6:06am

Great thanks for the pointers...

I understand the Pantheon releases are still in Alpha and that its not recommended to run production sites yet of these images.

I think its very exciting that its even possible to launch an associated EBS with an instance, really look forward to this functionality.

I will experiment a bit more with the directions you have suggested and will give any relevant feedback in this group.

Thanks again for this most awesome work
Gregg

Using Project Mercury and your own site

Comments

Pushing the envelope

Thanks

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