Tuesday, November 29, 2011

BitNami Django Stack Cloud-ready with boto

At BitNami we are big fans of the Amazon Web Services Cloud. As part of our commitment to make AWS more accessible to developers and end-users, we have been bundling popular developer tools and SDKs with our stacks. Currently, BitNami LAMP/WAMP and MAMP Stacks ship the PHP AWS SDK tools and RubyStack ships the latest stable version of the Ruby AWS SDK. You can also download BitNami Cloud Tools, an all-in-one installer that includes the most popular command line tools available for the Amazon API: EC2, Beanstalk, ELB, RDS, SES etc.

So, what does all of the above have to do with Django? We are happy to announce that the latest version of BitNami Django Stack ships the most popular Python interface to Amazon Web Services: the boto project. Boto is an integrated interface to current and future infrastructure services offered by Amazon, including S3, EC2, SQS, ELB, SNS among others.

Please see below for a quick intro on how to use boto to launch a BitNami Django Stack instance in the EC2 Cloud:
  • First, create a text file  (aws-credentials.txt) that includes your AWS credentials :
AWSAccessKeyId=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
AWSSecretKey=YOUR_SECRET_KEY
  • Go to your BitNami Django Stack installation and open the "use_djangostack" console and set the AWS_AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE environment variable.
On Windows: > set AWS_AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE="C:\path\to\aws-credentials.txt"
On OS X or Linux: $ export AWS_AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE=/path/to/aws-credentials.txt
  • Open a Python terminal and create a the connection
bash-3.2$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Nov 16 2011, 09:41:19) [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5250)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. 
>>> from boto.ec2.connection import EC2Connection 
>>> connection = EC2Connection()

  • Check that your aws credentials are correct if you see the following error:
'Check your credentials' % (len(names), str(names))) boto.exception.NoAuthHandlerFound: No handler was ready to authenticate. 1 handlers were checked. ['QuerySignatureV2AuthHandler'] Check your credentials
  • No launch the BitNami DjangoStack AMI using boto:
>>> images = connection.get_all_images(image_ids=['ami-2bbb7342']) 
>>> image = images[0] >>> image.location u'979382823631/bitnami-djangostack-1.3.1-1-linux-ubuntu-10.04-ebs' 
>>> reservation = image.run()

  • Now it is starting the instance, you can check the state
>>> reservation.instances [Instance:i-cf1334ac] 
>>> instance = reservation.instances[0] 
>>> instance.state u'pending' 
>>> instance.update() u'running'

  • Once instance is running, you will know the public domain name and you can check that it is working from your web browser.
>>> instance.dns_name u'ec2-XX-XXX-XX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com'

  • As we have started an EBS volume, you can select to stop it or remove it once you are done with it.
>>> instance.stop() 
>>> instance.update() u'stopping' 
>>> instance.update() u'stopped' 
>>> instance.terminate() 
>>> instance.update() u'terminated'



Monday, November 28, 2011

BitNami Cloud Tools updated to AWS EC2 API 1.5.0.0 version

BitNami Cloud Tools installer is a collection of the most popular command line tools available for the Amazon API: EC2, Beanstalk, ELB, RDS, SES etc. The installer ships all the required dependencies to have a fully configured environment to start playing with every Amazon API from your development machine, including a JDK, Perl and Ruby runtimes, etc. BitNami Cloud Tools is available for Windows, Linux and OS X.

This new version of BitNami Cloud Tools ships the latest version of the EC2 API among other improvements:

  • Update aws-ec2-api 1.5.0.0
  • Update aws-elb 1.0.15.1
  • Update aws-sdk-ruby 1.2.3
  • Update aws-sdk-java 1.1.7.1-20


In this guide you can find a quick start guide to launch and use instances using the EC2 API.
Enjoy!

Friday, November 18, 2011

Popular Plugins for Drupal and Wordpress Now Included in BitNami Stacks!

In our effort to facilitate the deployment process of open source applications, we are starting to include the most popular modules and plugins for applications to the BitNami Stacks. These modules allow you to extend and customize your application. We have started with two of the most popular BitNami applications: WordPress and Drupal. See below for details on which plugins have been included with each stack.

BitNami WorPress now ships the following plugins:

- all-in-one-seo-pack 1.6.13.4. This plugin optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines.
- contact-form 7.3.0.1. It is an easy way to create contact forms for you web page.
- google-analytics-for-wordpress 4.2.2. An easy way con connect your blog with Google Analytics to check the traffic sources, see the visitors, etc.
- google-sitemap-generator 3.2.6. This plugin will generate a special XML
sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.
- jetpack 1.1.3. This plugin supercharges your self‑hosted WordPress site with the features of WordPress.com: subscriptions, stats and more.
- simple-tags 2.1.2. Add some tools for taxonomies : Terms suggestion, Mass Edit Terms, Auto link Terms, etc
- wptouch 1.9.35. This plugin automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application.

BitNami Drupal now includes the following modules by default:

- admin_menu 7.x-3.0-rc1. This module provides a theme-independent administration interface.
- apachesolr 7.x-1.0-beta10. This module integrates Drupal with the Apache Solr search platform.
- ctools 7.x-1.0-rc1. This suite is primarily a set of APIs and tools to improve the developer experience.
- google_analytics 7.x-1.2. An easy way con connect your site with Google Analytics.
- imageapi 7.x-1.x-dev. A toolkit for managing images.
- pathauto 7.x-1.0. This module automatically generates URL/path aliases.
- smtp 7.x-1.0-beta1. This module let you send emails directly to an SMTP server.
- token 7.x-1.0-beta7. Tokens are small bits of text that can be placed into larger documents via simple placeholders.
- views 7.x-3.0-rc1. It provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content are presented.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Updated BitNami PHP platform stacks with MySQL 5.5

We are happy to announce that we have updated our BitNami PHP platforms Stacks (LAMP, MAMP, WAMP, LAPP, MAPP and WAPP) to include MySQL 5.5. This has been widely requested by our users as it significantly improves performance, specially on multi-core systems. The default storage engine is now InnoDB instead of MyISAM. The stacks also include now the MySQL native driver for PHP 5.3, which removes the need to link external libraries and improves performance in many common scenarios.

In addition to MySQL 5.5, the following major components were updated:

  • Apache 2.2.21 
  • PHP 5.3.8 
  • PostgreSQL 9.1.1 
  • phpMyAdmin 3.4.7.1 
  • phpPgAdmin 5.0.3 
  • AWS SDK for PHP 1.4.7 
We want to give a big thanks to everybody who continues to provide feedback and participate in our  our Q&A forum. While we cannot implement every request right away, we continue working to improve all BitNami applications based on your input and needs. Gracias!

Friday, November 4, 2011

Create awesome surveys with LimeSurvey

At BitNami we do our best to make it easy for you to discover, install and use the best open source applications. We already package wikis, content management systems, blog software, customer relationship managers and more.

We are happy to announce a new addition to our family, LimeSurvey. This project allows users to quickly create intuitive, powerful question-and-answer surveys that can work for tens to thousands of participants without much effort. The survey software itself is self-guiding for the respondents who are participating.
Creating a Survey

Survey Example

BitNami makes setting up LimeSurvey a simple process, so you can be publishing surveys in no time. As with all BitNami applications, LimeSurvey is available as a native installer, virtual machine image or Amazon cloud template (AMI). In the case of the native installers, you can download the complete software stack or a module installer that will automatically install it on top of an existing BitNami Stack that you already have installed on your system. LimeSurvey will also soon be available in BitNami Cloud Hosting, allowing it to be deployed to the Amazon cloud in one click and automatically backed up and monitored. Combined with the AWS free usage tier, you can have a completely free hosted setup of LimeSurvey.

If you need help in customizing or extending LimeSurvey, there are a number of partners that can help you.