Make your cheap VM fly

transcript

professional services for the webconsultancy design development hosting training support

Saturday, March 2, 13

Making yourcheap VM fly!

The slidesDownload them here:

http://www.codeenigma.com/sites/default/files/field/blog-uploads/vm.pdf

Getting startedWhat do you need?

A virtual server - you can buy one (e.g. Linode, Rackspace) or you can run one on your computer (e.g. VMWare)

I’m using VirtualBox

Why would you do that?!

VirtualBox because...One reason:

VAGRANT!

It makes setting up a VM on your computer very easy

http://vagrantup.comhttp://www.vagrantbox.es

VirtualBox because...Quick plug:

Room BG104

Vagrant: A Crash Course with Marcus Deglos

Choose a base OSAssuming Linux here

You could use Ubuntu, Redhat, Debian, Mint, blah blah blah

We’re using CentOS...

THAT’S IT! I’M LEAVING!!

Don’t go, here’s why...I’m lazy

It doesn’t really matter

I’ll do a quick Ubuntu / Debian run through at the end

Please stay!

OK, let’s go...To prepare, we have:

1. Downloaded a basic CentOS base box for Vagrant

2. Brought up the network interface

3. Installed yum-priorities

4. Installed nano (I know, but I hate vim!)

OK, let’s go...We also installed a couple of repositories for CentOS:(Note, order is important.)

1. EPELrpm --import https://fedoraproject.org/static/0608B895.txt

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

2. Remirpm --import http://rpms.famillecollet.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi

rpm -ivh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm

OK, let’s go...See also this excellent HOWTO which, though modified, is the basis for what I am demonstrating:

http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-nginx-with-php5-and-php-fpm-and-mysql-support-on-centos-6.3

The databaseAt Code Enigma we use Percona, because it’s fully MySQL compatible but significantly quicker.

Percona keep their own Linux repositories:rpm --import http://www.percona.com/downloads/RPM-GPG-KEY-percona

rpm -ivh http://www.percona.com/downloads/percona-release/percona-release-0.0-1.x86_64.rpm

The databaseDon’t forget to assign the new Percona repo a priority!

Then we can install and start the database server:yum install Percona-Server-client-55 Percona-Server-server-55 -y

service mysql start

Secure it and make sure it comes back after reboot:mysql_secure_installation

chkconfig --levels 235 mysql on

The web serverHere we use Nginx, which is much faster than Apache but there is one important thing you should know:

• No .htaccess files!

All that stuff that comes with Drupal - it needs to go in your Nginx server configuration

The web serverNginx is in the EPEL repository, so install away!

yum install nginx -y

Yup, that’s it!

Note, in CentOS the web root directory is in an odd place:

/usr/share/nginx/html

But what about PHP?Indeed, there is no PHP ‘module’ equivalent for Nginx.

Instead we use PHP-FPM, a packaged version of FastCGI

This is available for CentOS in the ‘Remi’ repository

But what about PHP?The standard set of packages needs a slight tweak:

DON’T use php-mysql

DO use php-mysqlnd instead

yum install php-fpm php-cli php-mysqlnd php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-magickwand php-magpierss php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mssql php-shout php-snmp php-soap php-tidy -y

But what about PHP?Then there’s APC, opcode caching for PHP

yum install php-pecl-apc -y

And finally, let’s make sure these services start!

chkconfig --levels 235 nginx onchkconfig --levels 235 php-fpm on

Configuration timeWith all the building blocks in place, it’s time to configure!

1. The firewall - let’s allow HTTP traffic:

/etc/sysconfig/iptables

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

Configuration time2. PHP configuration:APC needs 128M RAM (shm_size) to be effectivehttp://2bits.com/articles/importance-tuning-apc-sites-high-number-drupal-modules.html

3. Nginx configuration:- Drupal .htaccess file rules- FastCGI configuration- We have a consolidated configuration file

Configuration time/etc/php.d/apc.ini

[...]; The size of each shared memory segment, with M/G suffixeapc.shm_size=128M[...]

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

[...]worker_processes 4;[...]keepalive_timeout 2;[...]

Configuration time/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

location / { root /usr/share/nginx/html; index index.php index.html index.htm;}

# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000#location ~ \.php$ { root /usr/share/nginx/html; try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params;}

Configuration time/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

# deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root# concurs with nginx's one#location ~ /\.ht { deny all;}

Let’s Drupal!Create a database, then:

wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.20.tar.gztar -zxvf drupal-7.20.tar.gz

sudo mv drupal-7.20 /usr/share/nginx/sudo mv /usr/share/nginx/html /usr/share/nginx/html_oldsudo mv /usr/share/nginx/drupal-7.20 /usr/share/nginx/html

sudo mkdir /usr/share/nginx/html/sites/default/filessudo cp /usr/share/nginx/html/sites/default/default.settings.php /usr/share/nginx/html/sites/default/settings.php

Let’s Drupal!REMEMBER there are some very specific Nginx configurations for Drupal:

http://wiki.nginx.org/Drupal

OK, but where’s Varnish?Good question!

Less than 4GB RAMVarnish does more harm than good!

Other bitsWhat about drush?

http://packages.codeenigma.com/debian/pool/main/

What about Ubuntu / Debian?

All of these packages are available in the ‘dotdeb’ repo:http://www.dotdeb.org/http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1025286

Other bitsDon’t forget memcached!

http://drupal.org/project/memcache

Highly recommended as a replacement cache back-end

Available in all ‘major’ Linux repositories

We usually give memcached 512M RAM

questions?

Those slides againhttp://www.codeenigma.com/sites/default/files/field/blog-uploads/vm.pdf

professional services for the webconsultancy design development hosting training support

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