Mercury

Mercury is an open-source effort to create reusable, common, stable, kickass stacks for running Drupal. It began as an effort targeted to Amazon EC2, but really wants to have its stacks run anywhere/everywhere Drupal is found.

The current best place to get code from is this GitHub repository:

https://github.com/boztek/mercury

The ideas here have also spawned Pantheon Systems, which provides commercial service, but this group is about free and open-source DIY server configuration for Drupal.

Setting up EBS

Posted by cpelham on February 3, 2010 at 5:17am

Are there detailed instructions anywhere on how to set up the EC2 instance to work with an EBS volume? I've got Mercury going on an EC2 instance, and I've created and connected an EBS volume but now I'm lost. How do I move the Pressflow directory to the EBS volume? How do I upload my sites/all folder from local up to the EBS? How do I move the mysql databse? And how do I make sure the EC2 instance points to the files on the EBS?

PANTHEON Relaunch / On-Demand Service

Posted by joshk on February 3, 2010 at 1:19am

Hey all, just a quick heads up. We've relaunched the PANTHEON website with a new design that goes beyond the cloud and into SPACE!

http://getpantheon.com

In addition to fresh graphics, this outlines our plan to roll out an on-demand service to give people VPS instances with Mercury pre-installed at competitive prices. That'll be going live in the next couple weeks after an official 1.0 announcement.

You can read more details in my partner Zack's blog post:

http://www.chapterthree.com/blog/zack_rosen/pantheon_project_blazes_ahead

Missing install step

Posted by cpelham on January 30, 2010 at 2:03am

I created an EC2 account, got my pair key etc.
I found the mercury beta image and launched it. I chose all default settings.
I can ssh to the public DNS.
But, when i try to load the public DNS in a web browser, it always times out.
I've tried this repeatedly. Do the default security group settings need to be modified in some way?

Testing Drupal With Hudson

Posted by joshk on January 29, 2010 at 7:07pm
Last updated by VinceW on Tue, 2011-06-21 18:28

This wiki page is a placeholder to capture best practices for setting up Hudson to perform automated tests on Drupal.

Some quick links:

Getting XML from SimpleTest: http://drupal.org/node/602332
Drush+Coder and Hudson: http://sysadminsjourney.com/content/2010/01/20/drupal-meet-hudson-hudson...
Pre-configured AMI: http://getpantheon.com/vulcan
A beginnersguide to using Hudson for continuous integration with Drupal (grouppost): http://groups.drupal.org/node/96289

Much more to come! Add your favorite resources!

Mercury 0.9-Beta released

Posted by Greg Coit on January 25, 2010 at 11:58pm

Mercury 0.9-Beta has been released. Updates in this version include:

1) mysql configured to use per-table storage for innodb
2) apc replace by memcached (apc is still installed and can be enabled in settings.php)
3) mecached configured with 8 bin by default

And as mentioned before, we're starting support for BCFG2 server configuration. BCFG2 will be fully supported by the next (1.0) release of Mercury.

The AMI names are PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury-32-0.9-Beta.manifest.xml and PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury-64-0.9-Beta.manifest.xml

AMI ID's are:

us-west:
32: ami-c7530282

using BCFG2 to manage Pantheon

Posted by Greg Coit on January 12, 2010 at 6:22pm

To support our efforts to make Pantheon and all it's parts available on multiple operating systems and virtual private servers, we're implementing BCFG2 (http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2) for configuration and management. We've placed BCFG2 configuration files for Mercury on Ubuntu Jaunty 32 bit server in our launchpad project (https://launchpad.net/projectmercury) for folks to start using.

Fatal error when logging out on Mercury AMI

Posted by paradox281 on December 22, 2009 at 12:48am

I am using the latest 32bit Mercury AMI, and I get this error message most of the times I log out. Please help.

Fatal error: session_start() [function.session-start]: Failed to initialize storage module: user (path: /var/lib/php5) in /var/www/pressflow/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 1550

Problem w/ varnish

Posted by kyle_mathews on December 19, 2009 at 6:59pm

I was experimenting with the pantheon EC2 image today. Everything seemed to be working fine once I booted it up. I ran ab from another ec2 instance and was getting ~2000 req/sec and so forth.

I then tried moving an existing site over to the server. I rsynced my module and theme files into the pressflow install and enabled backup_migrate and imported a current sql dump from my existing site. And... things were now dog slow. I made sure to set the performance settings as before -- w/ 10 min max cache but pages are taking 2-3 secs. to load and varnish isn't serving pages at all.

PIFR 2 client added to Pantheon

Posted by Greg Coit on December 15, 2009 at 10:50pm

In order to support qa.drupal.org in testing Drupal 7, we've made a AMI of PIFR 2 on Debian Lenny (64-bit). The purpose of this client is to grab a test from qa.drupal.org, run it, and send the results back to the server.

If you wish to fire up an instance and donate to testing of Drupal 7, here are the instructions (from http://qa.drupal.org/node/44):

Get an account on the master server or have someone add your client test server and provide you an API key.

Mercury instance renders multisite strange

Posted by nullvariable on December 12, 2009 at 7:41pm

I've got a pretty stable Mercury instance running (I forget which version). I've not got any production sites on it though I do plan to leverage a Mercury box for that soon.

On this box I have a strange quirk that I can't seem to figure out. If I've not loaded a page for several hours it sends me output of the home page in a /node format instead of the node I've set for the home page. Hit refresh and it does what it's supposed to do.

EC2 Instances can now Boot from Amazon EBS

Posted by SeanBannister on December 4, 2009 at 2:04am

Amazon just announced a new feature that allows EC2 instances to boot directly from an EBS Volume. This means the root partition of the instance is actually stored on an EBS volume, making the instance completely persistent. After reading the documentation it appears you can also automatically attach multiple EBS volumes to the instance when it's launched.

Mercury 0.81-Beta Released

Posted by Greg Coit on December 3, 2009 at 1:08am

Announcing the immediate release of Mercury 0.81-Beta for Amazon in 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

Consistent snapshots question

Posted by Macronomicus on November 28, 2009 at 12:00pm

Been trying out mercury & all seems to be working quite well but now im on the snapshots bit & have a question... I followed your instructions for a single ebs drive http://groups.drupal.org/node/33092 and it all seemed to work except the consistent snapshots stuff... What is the replacement pattern for the command you listed here http://groups.drupal.org/node/36766 ... ive tried adding the relevant bits in that command but keep getting the following error.

Mounting the persistant volume in EC2 best practice

Posted by liorkesos on November 24, 2009 at 10:47pm

I'm trying to figure out the correct way to mount the ebs volume for persistant storage.
What do you guys do?
I find myself mucking around moving /var around?
do you simply mount on /vol and send symlinks from /var/lib/mysql and /var/www?
Do these symlinks persist after a reboot?
Just trying to brainstorm about the steps you do to attach a volume immediately after provisioning mercury.
Lior

Mercury 0.8-Beta released

Posted by Greg Coit on November 24, 2009 at 8:17pm

We are please to announce the 0.8-Beta release of Mercury AMIs for AWS. Included with this release:

Removed the predefined admin user from drupal. Now the first login defines the admin user
Moved drupal cron from the root crontab to /etc/cron.d/drupal for more flexibilty
Fixed as postifix misconfiguration bug
Now using symlinks to store mysql, varnish (and now) tomcat data to /mnt rather than moving the actual directories
A new script to configure varnish, php, tomcat and apc memory usage based on system RAM

Consistent EBS Snapshots for RAID arrays or single volume with Mercury

Posted by nullvariable on November 23, 2009 at 7:21pm
Last updated by R-H on Sat, 2010-06-19 22:11

This wiki describes setting up consistent snapshots for EBS. It works with RAID arrays and a single volume. It also can be automated to run on a cron job.

Step 1: EBS Consistent Snapshots Installation

Instructions for installing ec2-consistent-backup can be found here: http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot.

Set-up access to Alestic PPA

codename=$(lsb_release -cs) echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/alestic/ppa/ubuntu $codename main"|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/alestic-ppa.list

Setting up EBS as a RAID

Posted by nullvariable on November 23, 2009 at 4:46pm
Last updated by Greg Coit on Thu, 2010-06-10 17:27

Very similar to setting up an instance with a single EBS drive, you can also fairly easily do a RAID configuration. This leads to better performance usually and higher reliability.

Re: Setting up EBS for Mercury [Beta]

Posted by steven jones on November 19, 2009 at 7:16pm

Apologies for the placement of this 'bug report' but I don't have time to correctly change the wiki page here:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/33092

It describes getting mercury running from EBS, but I think that you'll find the latest versions of mercury get mysql to read its data from /mnt/mysql not the usual /var/lib/mysql so the copying and mounting doesn't actually put the database in EBS.

I would research and correct the post properly, but I don't have time at the moment.

Roadmap

Posted by lukehamilton on November 14, 2009 at 6:22am

Hey guys,

Just started looking at this project and really impress.

I was wondering if there is any kind of roadmap or high level plan about for where you would like to take this project in the long term at all?
L

Pantheon image downloads?

Posted by Perhaps on November 10, 2009 at 12:34am