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.

Mercury EBS Boot Instance

Posted by R-H on June 18, 2010 at 12:50am
Last updated by R-H on Sat, 2010-06-19 22:18

I'm going to try to consolidate the various wikis here that address the steps needed to create a Mercury EBS Boot Instance.

As far as I can tell these are the ones:

Different directory installation and vhost support

Posted by Anonymous on June 16, 2010 at 9:18pm

Hello and thank you for Mercury/Pantheon, now Drupal flies ;)

Is it possible to install the main site outside /var/www or inside a subdirectory (/var/www/mainsite). I know version 1.1 has multisite support, but is it compatible with vhosts (other websites on the same server)?

Thank you in advance

Re: Running Drupal/Pressflow on Lucid wiki page

Posted by timwood on June 14, 2010 at 9:25pm

In Greg's post here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/72718 he discusses how to make Ubuntu Lucid use php5 packages from Ubuntu Karmic due to the issues with php5.3 and Drupal. I tried using this approach on a server I'm building (non-mercury/pantheon) and discovered a few holes in the documentation, I think...

VirtualBox Mercury

Posted by Michael Hofmockel on June 14, 2010 at 3:29am

I just finished building a Mercury VirtualBox appliance to serve as a development environment. Check it out - http://michaelhofmockel.com/toughts/virtualbox-mercury
The readme will help you setup networking and supply credentials.

Thanks ChapterThree for Mercury!
Thanks Greg for you instructions (no problems following them).

Pantheon Mercury Stackscript on Linode 540

Posted by carlosbedia on June 13, 2010 at 1:01pm

I used Justin's Stackscript on linode 540 and was able to migrate my site although I enabled Memcache, Varnish, and Apache Solr and noticed there was not any instructions I could find to configure these based on the stackscript's setup and I want to be sure I am doing it correctly. Also there where no entries in settings.php for these modules specifically. According to some other material I read on getpantheon.com HOWTO suggested to include but wonder if all the ports are correct.

Add custom packages to the bcfg2 server

Posted by secoif on June 10, 2010 at 11:53pm

This is probably more of a bcfg2 question but:

After installing the client from the bcfg2 server, I want to add a bunch of packages, eg git, phpmyadmin, locate, etc. What's the best way to add a set of packages to my server so that I don't need to do a bunch of apt-getting after every client installs?

Thanks

Ubercart & Performance

Posted by mpaler on June 10, 2010 at 10:30pm

Hi,

I'm running Ubercart on a Mercury server and it appears that Ubercart requires session cookies even for anonymous users (see: https://wiki.fourkitchens.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=13828781).

The problem is, that sessions cookies prevent Varnish from caching those pages (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/66888) -- and on top of that, once the user hits an Ubercart page, all other non-Ubercart pages stop being served from Varnish cache as long as that session cookie is present and subsequently performance for those pages is going from ~ 200ms to ~ 1sec.

Altering the init.sh to support EBS-boot - Fixed!!!

Posted by Greg Coit on June 7, 2010 at 8:40pm

I received the following email today and i thought it was a question many folks would like to know the answer to:

Is there a way to alter your mercury init.sh so it will ask the directory to move mysql and other files too?

This will help all those folks struggling with the EBS set up.

My simple solution will be to start up the cannonical EBS for Lucid, (which is in ext3), attach another EBS volume formatted in XFS, install mercury in the EBS boot, move mysql datadir to the XFS formatted EBS, move most logfiles to /mnt and if necessary, start another EBS volume for innodb logs.

Updated 7/12/10 with solution!

Ongoing maintenance of a Mercury Server

Posted by mpaler on June 4, 2010 at 8:39pm

Ok, so you have your Mercury system up and running and everything is going swimmingly. Are there any regular "maintenance" tasks (besides your version upgrades and security patches) one should perform to keep this wonderful Varnish enhanced Pressflow system running smoothly.

Thanks in advance,
Mike

Varnish randomly stopped?

Posted by j0k3z on June 4, 2010 at 7:49pm

My website went down today and I couldnt figure out what the issue was. Eventually restarting varnish brought the site back.

Any idea why varnish might have randomly stopped running?
Were can I find logs to see what the issue was?
What is the best way to monitor a server so I know when things go down or if resources running low?

Next Mercury supported OS - Debian Lenny or Debian Squeeze?

Posted by Greg Coit on June 2, 2010 at 11:53pm

Lenny

83% (5 votes)

Squeeze

17% (1 vote)

Total votes: 6

Running Drupal/Pressflow on Lucid.

Posted by Greg Coit on June 2, 2010 at 6:08pm
Last updated by Greg Coit on Fri, 2010-06-18 23:30

As many of you know, Ubuntu Lucid shipped with PHP 5.3 which is incompatible with many Drupal 6 modules. The solution the Mercury team decided on was to pin PHP to 5.2 until the situation with 5.3 was resolved. Mercury 1.1 has this built in.

We've added all php5 packages to the file and are hosting it here: http://pantheon-storage.chapterthree.com/lucid

6/18/10 - found a bug and update the above file and the list below (for some reason, changing php5-imagick, php-apc and php5-memcache to karmic-updates caused it to fail)
6/15/10 - added updates from http://groups.drupal.org/node/75003 (view that page if you're using aptitude rather than apt-get)

Instructions for setting up multi-site on Mercury

Posted by Greg Coit on June 1, 2010 at 9:58pm
Last updated by steveoliver on Tue, 2011-06-07 21:46

These instructions are for any Mercury 1.1 Beta created after 6/1/10 (including the Mercury 1.1 Beta2 AMIs we released on 5/29/10).

Rackspace Setup on Lucid

Posted by Cayenne on June 1, 2010 at 4:30pm

I followed the step-by-step instructions greg so kindly posted, and added a few annotations where the install seemed to take a really long time without progress reports from Linux.

This was a plain Rackspace instantiation on Lucid Lynx.

Greg, thanks for the great job!

Couple of questions:

I seemed to need to run this command twice: sudo bcfg2 -vqed. It just hangs after the first install, it seems. Have others reported that?
I needed to manually set up the mySQL database. Perhaps related to #1 above, perhaps not.

Voxel Support?

Posted by joostvdl on June 1, 2010 at 11:03am

I want to start using Mercury on Voxel VoxCloud server (http://www.voxel.net/products-services/voxcloud). Are there any starting points to look for?

Which experiences are there around?

The reason to go for Voxel is that they have in Amsterdam also a cloud environment. Because my customers are based in the Netherlands I think this would be a benefit for the performance. (any comments on my thoughts?)

5/29/10 New Mercury 1.1 on Lucid Images (Beta)

Posted by Greg Coit on May 29, 2010 at 11:06pm

We're pleased to announce new AWS AMIs for Mercury 1.1 on Ubuntu Lucid. These Beta AMIs were made using the instructions posted here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/70268. AMI IDs after the jump...

Project Mercury 1.1 using BCFG2 - BETA - Solr Error

Posted by ivan25 on May 25, 2010 at 9:41am

Hi,

Couple of things I would like to ask:

First I have an error with Solr after doing the complete install procedure.
It complains about the data/index directory not existing.
I think there is an error in the setup script as it tries to create it in /var/solr/.solr/data/index.
A quick change in the Solr config file fixed it (uncommented the default directory and set it to /var/solr).

Another question is related to the init script.
If using an EBS instance, why move everything to /mnt and have the risk of loosing it if the instance is terminated/crashed ?

Any freelancers available to help move a site to Amazon EC2 + Mercury?

Posted by j0k3z on May 24, 2010 at 8:01pm

Are there any freelancers available to help move a site to Amazon EC2 + Mercury?

I have played with the amis but I really have never setup a server before so Im looking to hire someone to get me off the ground running.

Anyone available? Please help me!

Better instructions for non-typical installations are needed

Posted by oxford-dev on May 24, 2010 at 12:16pm

I have been battling with the mercury install on my own hosted server (not aws, rackspace or any of the other hosts currently supported).

I have full root access on a clean jaunty installation and I been trying to go through the instructions on http://groups.drupal.org/node/50408

Everything seems to fine up until:

'9) Start the BCFG2 server:

Wait until the bcfg2-server spins up - you know the server is ready when see "serve_forever() [start]".

sudo /etc/init.d/bcfg2-server start; tail -f /var/log/syslog'

I cannot get it to run, I just keep getting errors like:

Any plans on using Amazon RDS ?

Posted by ivan25 on May 22, 2010 at 11:56am

Amazon is providing MySQL hosting through RDS.
It comes with very interesting features (Automated Backups, DB snapshots, multi AZ deployments) out of the box.
Is it an interesting alternative to setting up your own MySQL on EBS as it may require less administration and can scale easily ?

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