newsroomdev / servers

Server setup scripts for NPR Apps servers.

NPR Apps Servers

• About NPR Apps servers
• Configure the project
• Install requirements
• Creating servers
• Cron
• Add Nginx sites
• Deploy to EC2

About Servers

These scripts are designed to turn a brand new Ubuntu 12.04 server image into a fully functional server.

It is expected that AMI snapshots will be taken of each server and used for routine spin-ups, but these scripts allow us to quickly modify the basic recipe. (And track changes.)

Remember: never make a baked AMI public.

Install requirements

Make a virtualenv and install the project requirements:

cd servers
mkvirtualenv servers
pip install -r requirements.txt

Creating servers

If creating servers with the web console isn't fast enough for you, then you can create servers from the command line with the EC2 API tools. Install them with:

brew install ec2-api-tools

At the end of the installation a set of environment variables to be set will be printed. Be sure to add these to your ~/.bash_profile. You will also need to download a private key and X.509 certificate from AWS. Update the EC2_PRIVATE_KEY and EC2_CERT environment variables to point to these files.

Once configured you can create a new server from your command line:

• Create server: ec2-run-instances ami-1cdd532c -t t1.micro --region us-west-2 --key nprapps
• Get server DNS name: ec2-describe-instances --region us-west-2 $INSTANCE_ID (keep running until available)

Cron

Creating a new cron/basic server:

• Install list of live SSH keys: scp -i ~/.ssh/nprapps.pem [email protected]:~/.ssh/authorized_keys ubuntu@$SERVER_DNS_NAME:~/.ssh/
• SSH in: ssh ubuntu@$SERVER_DNS_NAME
• Fetch setup script: wget https://raw.github.com/nprapps/servers/master/setup_cron.sh
• Run setup script: sudo bash setup_cron.sh
• Type in configuration values and wait for script to complete. The server will reboot.
• SSH in again (see above)
• rm setup_cron.sh

TODO

Install/generate .s3cfg

Add Nginx sites

Add your configuration file to the nginx/sites-available/ folder. Use the static and status configurations as examples.

Do not deploy application-specific files with this app. Application-specific files should be added via the application's fab deploy command.

Deploy to EC2

Deploy your new server configurations to EC2.

fab <destination> deploy

The configurations are deployed with rsync, which means that you don't need to specify a branch. Whichever branch you are working in locally will be deployed to the server.