Do you have a recommended non-Mercury Drupal public AMI?

Posted by cookiesunshinex on February 11, 2011 at 9:51am

Until Mercury 1.1 or 1.2 comes out publicly, we are going to setup a plain vanilla Drupal server for development.

Can anyone recommend an EBS boot public AMI with Drupal?

Ubuntu 10.04
Apache
MySQL
PHP
Drupal
Webmin

There are a ton of AMIs out there, so I'm just asking if anyone has a recommended one that they've used.

Of course, I know that I could pretty easily build one myself in a few hours, just looking to save a little time.

Thanks

Comments

In case someone has the same

Posted by cookiesunshinex on February 14, 2011 at 10:46am

In case someone has the same question. Here is the information I got out of doing some research.

NOTE: The preferred method for me, is still going to be to use Pantheon. I was only looking for a short term, temporary image for a development server while we wait for Pantheon to go public/live.

The final result for me was that I spun up a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server. The latest official Canonical Ubuntu AMIs are are all listed at http://alestic.com/ for each region. The list is automatically updated with the latest images.
From there, I installed LAMP all in one go with one command, then added Mail servers, PhpMyAdmin, Webmin, Drupal, and finally Drush.

It actually wouldn't have taken me less time to just do that instead of going out and looking for other AMIs and trying out the ones I found.

Here's the command to get you started:
$ sudo tasksel install lamp-server

I found 3 main AMIs for Drupal. Here's what I thought about each one of them.

Bitnami (http://bitnami.org)

I tried spinning up one of the free Bitnami AMIs on a micro instance. I decided that it was not a viable solution due to poor documentation and non-standard, non-Ubuntu way software is installed such as Apache and Drupal.

If you run on the Bitnami cloud, it's easy to spin up an instance and backup your instance. There is a flat fee for using their system. For a single server, it's not worth it ($49/month up to 3 servers, on top of Amazon charges) - http://bitnami.org/cloud/pricing

PROS:
Up-to-date versions of Drupal 6.20 and 7 available.
Can run on micro instance.
AMIs are EBS boot.
Have a free AMI that you can use in addition to the cloud hosted version with a backup that is similar to Turnkey Linux's Hub setup.

CONS:
I found the Bitnami stack unusuable because of the customized installation of Apache.
It is installed in /opt/bitnami/apache2
sudo service apache2 restart didn't work - there is a bitnami specific command to restart it
Drupal was installed in a non-tradtional way /opt/bitnami/apps/drupal
By defualt apache was setup such that www.example.com was a bitnami splash page, whereas to get to Drupal, I had to go to http://www.example.com/drupal.
Changing the default apache root was not-inuitive (I couldn't figure it out).
No username/password supplied for PhpMyAdmin.
Poor documentation

Turnkey Linux(http://www.turnkeylinux.org)

I run another, non-Drupal turnkey linux appliance and it works pretty well, so I was familiar with how their AMIs and general setup works. Their software images are open source and you can download and install on your own hardware. They do not offer a free public Amazon AMI. If you use their Amazon AMI, you kick it off from their Hub. After logging into hub.turnkeylinux.org, you can spin up an instance, and configure automatic backups, similar to Bitnami's cloud backup feature. They charge 10% on top of the Amazon charges, so it's pretty affordable for a single server.

I decided against the Drupal AMI without installing it because of the following two cons.

CONS:
No free AMI version to try like Bitnami has.
The AMI is an instance boot.
The AMIs do not support micro instance, so you have to run a small instance at a minimum.
The AMI was built on a much older version of Drupal 6.16 (not really a big issue).
The following statement is on their page: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/drupal6
Note: Drupal 6 includes a built-in update status module. (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/drupal6)
* When enabled could produce confusing/annoying version notifications.
* This is due to drupal6 being installed and updated via the APT package manager, instead of manually from the upstream source code.

I didn't want to deal with having Ubuntu's apt-get manage my Drupal updates, I would rather use Drush.

Jumpbox (http://www.jumpbox.com)

They didn't have a free version to try, so I didn't try their service. It looks similar in setup and price to Bitnami.
http://www.jumpbox.com/pricing

Symetrik Design
Drupal Consulting
http://www.symetrkdesign.com

Jumpbox is offering a free

Posted by SpaceEater on March 3, 2011 at 1:22am

Jumpbox is offering a free year of running drupal with amazon aws free tier:
http://www.jumpbox.com/go/awsfree-drupal?utm_source=awsfree&utm_campaign...

Disclaimer: I didn't try it.

Re: Jumpbox is offering a free

Posted by smattoon on March 3, 2011 at 6:58am

I just flipped a Drupal 6 site from a small ec2 instance to Jumpbox, and reconnected my RDS instance to it, lickety split. Only hiccup was due to PHP 5.2 to 5.3 glitch - solved by D6 update. Thanks.

There are already Mercury

Posted by Macronomicus on March 5, 2011 at 6:50am

There are already Mercury AMI's in the AWS console. Have been for many many months...
im still running a modified Mercury 1.0, not had a trouble on it yet really.
Then there are the instructions to setup manually whichever parts you want in whichever linux distro you want.

I should have mentioned the

Posted by cookiesunshinex on March 6, 2011 at 11:03pm

I should have mentioned the Mercury AMIs in my above post.

There are Mercury 1.0 and Mercury 1.1beta AMIs available, but not 1.1 or 1.2 production, and no Drupal/Pressflow 7 version.

I ran a Mercury 1.1beat AMI for several months, but found it a bit too complex and limiting for a throwaway or development Drupal server.

I'm waiting on Mercury 1.2 (production) to be available as an AMI as well as Pantheon's hosted version.

Symetrik Design
Drupal Consulting
http://www.symetrkdesign.com

True you will have to tweak

Posted by Macronomicus on March 24, 2011 at 5:06am

True you will have to tweak them to your liking but the older ones work fine.

AFAICT pressflow7 is top secret or something, been trying to find info for a while ... there is a repository in git thats had tons of action (which stopped early this month) perhaps its coming soon.

Pantheon went the Rackspace

Posted by giorgio79 on March 29, 2011 at 4:57am

Pantheon went the Rackspace way?
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2010/04/20/pantheon-takes-the-guessw...

Does this mean that the public Amazon AMI development stopped?

****Me and Drupal :)****
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I dont think so... ...and I

Posted by Macronomicus on March 29, 2011 at 5:06am

I dont think so...
...and I hope not because I have zero desire to use rackspace.
That said there is nothing stopping you from creating your own setup based on the spec at pretty much any decent host there is in which you have full control of your server/s.

Cheers!

I know this is not a hosting

Posted by giorgio79 on March 29, 2011 at 12:27pm

I know this is not a hosting thread but have you had some bad experience with Drupal on Rackspace? I am looking at their cloud sites for an upcoming product launch. :)

****Me and Drupal :)****
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Review Critical - One of my sites

Well I've never used

Posted by Macronomicus on March 29, 2011 at 7:24pm

Well I've never used Rackspace ... the power of Amazon has kept me hooked since I started in the cloud a while back. I hear some people do like rackspace but I cant really give you an educated opinion beyond my occasional reviews of their offering, which consequently have never caused me to want to use Rackspace over Amazon.

Just my 2 cents ... you might want to hit IRC and ask around.