grapestack Goto Github PK

To install GRAPE Stack, create a new CentOS 6.3 instance in your Rackspace Cloud account and perform the following command chain as root before you perform *any* other actions on the server:

wget https://raw.github.com/grapestack/grapestack/master/install.sh -O /install.sh; chmod +x /install.sh; /install.sh

This will configure the new server as your master GRAPE Stack server. Once your master server is live, you can use it to add new servers to the stack, manage configurations and perform other administrative tasks. You can promote a different server to master later, but all servers in the stack will have administrative abilities via the web control panel.

Do not interrupt the script during installation. Wait until installation completes before performing any other actions on the server. Also, do not close the terminal connection until the installation completes.

Due to some temporary internal IP address references, only the Rackspace cloud is currently supported. Those addresses will soon be replaced with universal ones when Amazon cloud support is added.

Due to specific dependency requirements, only CentOS 6 and RHEL 6 are currently supported, although Fedora, Ubuntu and Mac support will be available very soon.

Once your master server has completed its initial setup, visit the Railo server administrator at:
http://{ipaddress}:8080/railo-context/admin/server.cfm

Grape starts Apache by default, but nginx is also configured and ready to use. This can be easily switched at the command line or through the control panel.

The Grape control panel is not currently finished, so new servers have to be set up manually by executing the install command chain above on each server.

This is a pre-pre-pre-alpha, so I've only pushed a few of the fully ready scripts. Some things, such as authorized_keys, have been hard-coded and will eventually be made dynamic when the final security measures are implemented.

A sample of the dashboard application is configured on your new server at http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/

To access this application, create a host entry on your *local* machine for:

{ipaddress} www.YOURDOMAIN.com

So, if your new server is's IP is 123.123.123.123, your host entry will look like:

123.123.123.123 www.YOURDOMAIN.com

The dashboard is also available by accessing the default website of the new server, which will be located at http://{ipaddress}

You will need to create an entry for each the following in your hosts file, replacing 123.123.123.123 with the actual IP address of your new server:

123.123.123.123 YOURDOMAIN.com
123.123.123.123 www.YOURDOMAIN.com
123.123.123.123 blog.YOURDOMAIN.com
123.123.123.123 admin.YOURDOMAIN.com

If you change the DNS for your domain name with your domain registrar (and create these subdomains) to point to the IP address of your server, then you won't need to create the host file entries once the DNS is active.

A blog driven by ContentBox (The ColdBox blogging and content management system) has also been pre-configured on on your stack.

Once you have configured your host file entry (or configured the DNS for your domain) and visited http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/ or http://{ipaddress} and see the login page, a sample CouchDB powered application will also be available at:
http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/couch/index.cfm

A mobile application driven by jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap is also available at:
http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/jqm/index.html

The default credentials to log into the dashboard are:
email: [email protected]
password: stackpass

FTP is available through SFTP, which may be easier to use if you allow password logins in the SSHD.

The stack will be locked down, with no password logins allowed, so you'll either need to enable password logins in /etc/ssh/sshd_config after Grape installs, or use the public key located at /grape/cluster/keys/cluster_key.pub to login via ssh. You can also use the console via your Rackspace control panel if you happen to get locked out for any reason.

UPDATE: I had password logins disabled originally, but have chosen to re-enable them in the default configuration. You can change this in /etc/ssh/sshd_config if you want the added security.

Anyway, this is all very rough and much is currently in development and testing is ongoing, so please contact me with any bugs errors that you find.

As of now, GRAPE will configure your CentOS server, modify iptables, create the proper users and permissions, install git, Java, Tomcat, Apache, nginx, Railo, ColdBox, Postfix (with Dovecot, TLS, spamassassin, virtual domains and users powered by MySQL, and spam moved to the spam folder), CouchDB with Lucene, CouchBase with the Railo extension pre-configured, Solr, BigCouch, Riak, MySQL, MySQL Proxy, node.js and the GRAPE sample application, which includes examples that connect to the stack via AJAX and a variety of other methods. Mobile application templates and other cool examples are also included, such as a CouchDB sample application. All software installed by Grape is installed with a fully working configuration specific to your stack. The GRAPE Stack sample application uses Twitter Bootstrap, LESS and Backbone.js and includes Facebook integration for signup / login to the sample application (just change the credentials in the relevant files).

The Grape Apache virtual host configuration allows for SSL virtual hosts on port 443, each with its own certificates, which will be generated automatically (self-signed) by GRAPE very soon, but can be replaced with your trusted CA signed certificate at anytime. These SSL virtual hosts can easily sit behind a high availability load balancer at Rackspace, and you can run nginx on port 80 for non-SSL requests and Apache on 443 for SSL requests if you'd like to further split the traffic behind the load balancers.

Once the Grape control panel is fully-accessible, you'll be able to login to your stack from any of its servers and manage the stack, create a clustered file system, configure load balancing, set up DRBD database failovers with redundant replication, add new software to your servers and scale your stack to your specific needs, all with zero configuration on your part. 

After your master server is configured, a snapshot of the fully configured server can be saved to your Rackspace Cloud Files account as a template image to launch new servers from almost instantaneously, without needing to have GRAPE build and install all of the software again on each new server. Using the template image, you will be able to launch a new server that is already configured for your domain name within minutes. Launching a server this way takes only the few minutes required to create and build the server instance. Creating an empty server and then running the GRAPE install scripts on that server takes the same amount of time to create the server, but you also have to wait for the install scripts to build and configure the software on the server. Using the template image, the installation of the GRAPE platform can be skipped since it's already saved and configured as part of the template image. If you need to launch a server for a different domain name than your existing stack, you can still use the template image to create the server, then use the control panel to change the domain name on the server and flag the server as the master server of a new cluster.

Rackspace Cloud Files is also configured and ready to be mounted as a readable/writable directory, just replace the credentials in /home/grape/.cloudfuse and mount the drive using the pre-configured cloudfuse with:

sudo /grape/cloudfuse/cloudfuse /grape/cloudfiles -o allow_other,nonempty

This will mount your Cloud Files account at: /grape/cloudfiles

I'll do my best to fix problems and answer questions, but many changes are on the way, so expect big updates soon. Next on the list will be automating the DRBD and OCFS2 modules that I've already included as scripts if you want to try and manually configure them yourself (and if successful, perhaps contribute back a block of code I can plug just into setup.sh to automate this?), but right now they are not set up during the initial installation of a master instance. That will be next, unless someone beats me to it and can submit a pull request.

The Grape control panel is called Vine. Vine allows you to easily manage your entire stack from any of the participating servers. I will publish it soon.

If you don't have a Rackspace account and want to try out GRAPE Stack, just contact me and I will create a completely clean server for you and give you the credentials so that you can do the initial login and set up a stack yourself to try it out for a little while.

Thank you to every single person who has worked on or used any of the projects that I have included (and depended on completely) here in *any* capacity. Also, thank you to the internet and the web, to users, open source, sharing, computers, community, social networks, friends and family, hackers, creators, automators, and anyone who loves technology. In the end, it's all about getting down to what's important; building stuff with people you like and still having time for everything else. Hopefully GRAPE Stack can help you do that, and maybe save you some headaches along the way. (I'll try to save you even more headaches when I add documentation and comments.)

Special thanks to Rackspace, Railo, Team ColdBox, Linux and GNU, the entire CFML community, and everyone involved in CouchDB or any other kind of open source project or initiative.

- Jim