Thursday, July 28, 2011

New BitNami Stack for OSQA: The Open Source Question and Answer System

We are excited to announce the addition of a new stack to the BitNami library . OSQA is an open source question and answer system, very similar to the popular Stack Overflow family of sites. OSQA helps manage and grow online communities by making it easy to discuss issues and find answers to questions. It is written in Python and powered by the Django application framework. As with all BitNami Stacks, the BitNami OSQA Stack contains everything you need in order to run OSQA and is available free of charge as a native installer, VMWare virtual appliance and Amazon Machine Image. Over the next few days, we will also add it to our BitNami Cloud offering. Together with the Amazon Free Tier, it will mean you can host and run your own OSQA site on the Cloud, completely for free! Below you can find a couple of screenshots of OSQA in action

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Custom Domains with BitNami Cloud Hosting


In the latest update to BitNami Cloud Hosting, we added the ability to get a custom domain for your servers. During the process of creating a new server, you will now see a field where you can enter your own domain prefix. You will then be able to access your server at your_domain_prefix.bitnamiapp.com. This makes it easier to share your application with others.

If you already have a BitNami Cloud Hosting account, you will see this new feature when you create a new server. If you do not yet have a BitNami Cloud Hosting account 
sign up for a free trial! 

Thursday, July 21, 2011

BitNami RubyStack now more Cloud-ready than ever

BitNami RubyStack is one of our most popular stacks and it enables anyone to be up and running with a Ruby on Rails environment in no time. It comes in three flavors: as a native installer, a virtual appliance or an Amazon Machine Image.

For those of you using RubyStack to power their Cloud development, you will be happy to know that the latest version of RubyStack has bundled and configured out-of-the-box support for Amazon's recently announced AWS SDK for Ruby. This SDK allows you to build Ruby applications that tap into the cost-effective, scalable, and reliable AWS cloud. It ships example code and a Quick Guide to get started in minutes using AWS infrastructure services.

For instance, you can do the following to upload files to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3):

 1. Install BitNami RubyStack in your machine. Windows, OS X and Linux are supported.

 2. Go to Start -> BitNami RubyStack -> Ruby Console on Windows or run the "rubyconsole.sh" script on OS X or Linux.

 3. Download the sample files from GitHub: 

$ git clone git://github.com/amazonwebservices/aws-sdk-for-ruby.git 
$ cd aws-sdk-for-ruby/samples/ 

 4. Create a file named config.yml in the samples directory as follows:

# Fill in your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key 
# http://aws.amazon.com/security-credentials 
access_key_id: REPLACE_WITH_ACCESS_KEY_ID 
secret_access_key: REPLACE_WITH_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY 

5. Run a sample script with the Ruby interpreter. For example, to run the "s3/upload_file.rb" sample:

$ echo "Hello, World!" > helloworld.txt 
$ ruby s3/upload_file.rb unique-bucket-name helloworld.txt 

You can also find a sample script to start and login to a AWS EC2 machine at "ec2/run_instance.rb".

 $ ruby ec2/run_instance.rb 
Using AMI: ami-8c1fece5 
Generated keypair ruby-sample-1311166524, fingerprint: d2:11:ff:36:ce:6c:64:da:58:58:35:15:3b:f0:33:d1:fb:89:58:55 
Using security group: ruby-sample-1311166532 
Launched instance i-818d59e0, status: running 

 If you are a PHP developer, the AWS SDK for PHP is already included in the Stack.

Alfresco for Teams Now Available on BitNami Cloud Hosting

Alfresco Team on BitNami Cloud Hosting

We have partnered with Alfresco to bring Alfresco Team, a platform for content sharing and collaboration, to the cloud! Alfresco Team is a powerful tool for teams that create content such as business documents, spreadsheets, presentations, designs, images, videos, and audio. Now that it is available in the BiNami Cloud Hosting library, you can deploy Alfresco Team to the cloud in minutes!

Thursday, July 14, 2011

BitNami Trac Stack with mod_wsgi released

We have just released a new version of the BitNami Trac Stack. This release still bundles Trac 0.12.2 (the latest stable version available) but includes some major improvements:

  • Configure Trac with Apache and mod_wsgi (instead of mod_python)
  • Upgrade Python to 2.6.5
  • Upgrade Subversion to 1.6.15
  • Upgrade SQLite to 3.5

Enjoy!