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.

Step-by-step: Installing Project Mercury 1.1 (Beta) on Ubuntu Lucid

Posted by Greg Coit on May 21, 2010 at 12:25am
Last updated by innovationcreation on Sun, 2014-11-16 21:22

Here are step-by-step instructions for building Project Mercury 1.1 (BETA!!!) on a fresh Ubuntu Lucid server using the configuration manager BCFG2. Project Mercury is known to work on AWS, Rackspace, RackspaceCloud and Linode. We have AMIs of Mercury 1.1 Beta for AWS EC2 (see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/71943) and (soon) a Linode script for Mercury 1.1 (both on Ubuntu Lucid).

6/1/10: Updates for multi-site support
7/12/10: Added EBS-boot and hudson support

Mercury's Template system

Posted by Greg Coit on May 20, 2010 at 11:45pm
Last updated by secoif on Fri, 2010-08-20 00:39

We've updated how we use BCFG2's template system so that making changes to your mercury server is easier. All tuneable configs are now located in /etc/mercury/server_tuneables. Changes made to the variables in this file will be applied (and not overwritten) by BCFG2 whenever it updates it's configuration.

When you make changes to the tuneables, remember to have bcfg2 update the environment:

bcfg2 -vqed #update the server environment

6/22/10: updated with new default settings.

speed up PHP and delete unnecessary please :)

Posted by grandjulien on May 19, 2010 at 5:04pm

Hello sir madam

Here, I have a configuration problem. I would like an installation type Mercury on my infrastructure. I:

Mysql 5
Drupal-6.16
-Pressflow 6.16
-PHP 5.2.13
-Apache 2.2

But I can have properly configured, Apache and PHP together ... . That 's why I come to ask for help please. I often breaks the site where when I have messages like this "INTERNAL ERROR", "NOT FOUND" I'm sure you could help me.

My English is bad, sorry.

Mercury, Pantheon, and multiple sites

Posted by zoon_unit on May 17, 2010 at 5:21pm

I understand that Mercury isn't configured for multi-site Drupal installs as of yet. I have heard this is because of issues with Apache-solr and memcache.

Question: Will these issues be resolved in the future, and if so, any predictions as to when Mercury will be compatible with multi-site and Aegir??

Question: What about multiple virtual hosts on a server? Can Mercury handle that? In other words, can a VPS host more than one Drupal virtual host (with separate Drupal codebases) and still use the power of Mercury?

Patheon on Linode.com & converting an existing site to pantheon

Posted by drupalninja99 on May 16, 2010 at 12:39am

I am trying out the mercury/pantheon install script on linode.com which is really cool because it sets everything up for you. Anyone else tried this? I was wondering what other's experiences were. The pantheon script is one of the most deployed scripts so a lot of people must be using this.

Status Update?

Posted by R-H on May 14, 2010 at 2:02am

Hey Greg,

Just wondering how you and your awesome team on doing on with getting Mercury on Lucid? Was thinking of starting a new site but wanted to wait until then.

Thank you kindly!
Ryan

A valuable test case for discussion on the 'ideal' setup

Posted by oxford-dev on May 12, 2010 at 6:25pm

I have been searching high and low for the best advice on stack setup for a site I want to release in the coming weeks/months. My issue is that nearly all discussion regarding performance only deals with anonymous and therefore easily cachable sites. I then stumbled upon this group which appears to be the answer to my prayers, although there is a lot of info in here to digest and make sensible use of.

Would Mercury be suitable for me?

Posted by wigglykoala on May 11, 2010 at 8:47pm

I've spent most of today oogling over videos and slideshows of what Mercury can do and how great it is/will be and I agree. I want to use it but does it want me?!

Segmentation fault (

Posted by aangel on May 11, 2010 at 2:02pm

If this question is too "in the weeds" for this forum, please let me know. I'm not sure where else to ask it, though.

I left my linode Mercury image on Saturday night with a problem with the Drupal installation (messed up bringing across some tables) but everything else was working (web server responded nicely, I think varnish was responding according to the tests I was making, etc.).

When I returned to the task just a half hour ago of moving across the project site, the site does not respond.

redeclare db_status_report()

Posted by mpaler on May 9, 2010 at 6:55pm

I hate to post petty stuff like this, but seems like this error is somehow related to Panthon/Pressflow setup and it's a pretty bad error.

My site is up and running fine, however, when I try to run cron, I get the following:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare db_status_report() (previously declared in /var/www/mysite/subdomains/dev2/httpdocs/includes/database.mysqli.inc:23) in /var/www/mysite/subdomains/dev2/httpdocs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 36

Same thing from drush.

Rebundle the Mercury AMI

Posted by mpaler on May 8, 2010 at 8:28pm

Has anyone in the group sucessfully re-bundled the Mercury AMI? I have a bunch of configuration changes (apache, ebs mount, etc) and additions (updated amazon AMI and API tools, s3cmd) that would like to avoid having to redo in the case of an instance failure.

Unfortunately, I've been trying for like two days to rebundle an instance using:

ec2-bundle-vol
ec2-upload-bundle
ec2-register

Steps 1 & 2 complete. Absolutely can't get the image to register!!!

Any help/suggestions are greatly appreciated...

Mike

What do you put in EBS?

Posted by mpaler on May 8, 2010 at 3:46am

I've read the tutorials explaining how to run MySQL off of EBS.

Does anybody out there put other parts of Drupal into EBS? eg. /default/files? your entire drupal installation?

I would love to hear more...

Mike

How best to test Mercury concurrency?

Posted by aangel on May 8, 2010 at 12:16am

Hi, I've set up a vps at linode with the current Mercury StackScript...it was easy and just worked. Fabulous and I'm stoked to keep going.

But I could use some education on how to know if the stack is performing properly. I'm examining this because in the next week or two it's likely my site is going to be slashdotted if an article comes out about the company on a major media outlet. Naturally, I don't want the site to go down as it did last time on my shared hosting provider. Not much point in getting good press if the site can't stay up.

Varnish not caching anonymous requests on my site

Posted by anantagati on May 6, 2010 at 3:47pm

I just installed Mercury on Linode server, but Varnish doesn't cache pages on site I transferred there.

Steps I did during site transfer:
- copied modules and themes
- copied files
- imported database (didn't change settings.php as I used same database as in settings.php)
- run update.php
- enabled Varnish, Cookie cache bypass modules

What is best way to protect Mercury install against DOS attacks?

Posted by anantagati on May 6, 2010 at 2:12am

Our site is sometimes getting DOS attack, on my previous LAMP installation I could install mod_evasive and it stopped all those attacks.

I installed mod_evasive on Mercury, but pages to attacking IP address are still served. It behaves like mod_evasive is completely ignored.

Anybody could put server down by using:
ab -k -n 1000 -c 50 http://domain/

I changed maximal number of servers in Apache config, so previous command doesn't crash server now, but it is still taking resources by generating pages.

How are you protecting your server against such attacks?

Development environment for Mercury/Pressflow?

Posted by mpaler on May 3, 2010 at 7:02pm

In Josh K's documentation covering how to install an existing drupal site into pressflow/mercury he says:

"A quick way to get rolling is to install your site over the top of the existing Pressflow Drupal instance that comes with the Mercury EC2 image. This is good if you have a simple site, and aren't concerned with managing the codebase with SVN or other version control going forward."

How-to move to a productive system with Mercury?

Posted by ayalon on May 3, 2010 at 9:07am

Thanks for the great efforts with Mercury! I used your excellent AMIs to set up a new EC2 Instance.

I installed my own Drupal Instance and MySQL DB, changed my php.ini settings and used solr to index my page.

Now I consider to switch to the productive system. At the moment I'm afraid to use this webserver because I know, that clicking the "Terminate" button in the Amazaon Management Console will completely destroy everything I've set up. Also a server failure will probably kill the server because I'm not able to reset th server.

Mercury AMI vs Lauchpad BCFG2

Posted by mpaler on May 1, 2010 at 10:19pm

Can someone please set me straight?

What is Launchpad?
What is BCFG2?
What is the advantage of "rolling your own" (ala http://groups.drupal.org/node/50408) vs. using the Mercury AMIs?

Installation questions

Posted by mpaler on May 1, 2010 at 12:09am

Hopefully this can be a thread where relative ignorants like me can post "dumb" questions when setting up Mercury....

Just installed the Mercury 1.0 32bit AMI. On the start page is wants to know which installation profile I want: Mercury or Pressflow. Which do I choose?

Thanks,
Mike

Drush make file for mercury?

Posted by qbnflaco on April 28, 2010 at 1:57pm

I'm currently taking mercury for a test drive to use with my aegir installation for hosting client sites. It would be great if there were a make file for mercury. This would make creating a platform the latest mercury version, a snap. I've never created a make file, so here's my first shot...

projects[pressflow][type] = "core" projects[pressflow][download][type] = "get" projects[pressflow][download][url] = "http://launchpad.net/pressflow/6.x/6.16.77/+download/pressflow-6.16.77.tar.gz"

projects[mercury][type] = profile
projects[mercury][download][type] = bzr

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