Documentation

Here are step-by-step instructions for building Project Mercury 1.1 (BETA!!!) on a fresh Ubuntu Lucid server using the configuration manager BCFG2. Project Mercury is known to work on AWS, Rackspace, RackspaceCloud and Linode. We have AMIs of Mercury 1.1 Beta for AWS EC2 (see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/71943) and (soon) a Linode script for Mercury 1.1 (both on Ubuntu Lucid).

6/1/10: Updates for multi-site support
7/12/10: Added EBS-boot and hudson support

Here are step-by-step instructions for building Project Mercury 1.1 (BETA!!!) on a fresh Centos 5.5 server using the configuration manager BCFG2. Project Mercury is known to work on AWS, Rackspace, RackspaceCloud and Linode. We'll have Centos images up on AWS soon.

Voxel.net has official Mercury 1.1 images available using 64-bit Centos (VSE) 5.2!

So long as you are following best practices, migrating an existing Drupal site onto PANTHEON is not very difficult. This page will walk you through the steps you need to take to deploy an existing site onto the base installation. If you are interested in deploying from version control, please see deploying from VCS with PANTHEON.

Congratulations! If you're reading this, you're doing things correctly. In the modern era of the web, we don't want to be making edits directly on a live site. It's just too risky, and it starts getting really tricky when you're working with a team. Deploying from version control solves these problems.

If you already have your own system or method of deploying a whole Drupal installation, feel free to take over all of /var/www on your PANTHEON server. You should base your application on Pressflow and include the ApacheSolr, Varnish and Memcached modules as well as the necessary settings.php configuration to utilize these features. For more on this, see the settings and module configuration page.

However, if you don't have an existing deployment system, but you do keep your code in version control (e.g. SVN) you can easily integrate with the provided Pressflow installation — which is itself checked out from Launchpad for easy updating — by following these instructions:

Even though the PANTHEON server "stack" is already tuned to run Drupal as fast as possible, if your application doesn't know how to take advantage of the environment you won't see the breakthrough performance. This page describes the few key steps you need to take to insure that your Drupal application is ready to blaze.

We know some folks are going want to upgrade their mercury servers from 1.0 or 1.1-Beta to 1.1 once it's released, so we've written instructions on how to do this.

We've updated how we use BCFG2's template system so that making changes to your mercury server is easier. All tuneable configs are now located in /etc/mercury/server_tuneables. Changes made to the variables in this file will be applied (and not overwritten) by BCFG2 whenever it updates it's configuration.

When you make changes to the tuneables, remember to have bcfg2 update the environment:

6/22/10: updated with new default settings.

To support our efforts to make Pantheon and all it's parts available on multiple operating systems and virtual private servers, we're implementing BCFG2 (http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2) for configuration and management. We've placed BCFG2 configuration files for Mercury on Ubuntu Jaunty 32 bit server in our launchpad project (https://launchpad.net/projectmercury) for folks to start using.

These instructions are for any Mercury 1.1 Beta created after 6/1/10 (including the Mercury 1.1 Beta2 AMIs we released on 5/29/10).

Once you've followed the steps outlined for installing your site on Mercury you'll then want to take your site to the next level using Elastic Block Store. This is going to keep your MySQL database(s) persistent should your server instance crash. Also make it easy to replicate data for testing etc.

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Updated... for Latest Mercury 1.1 release.
However it died after verifying the first Aegir site; I dont have the time to find out why at the moment so please use the previous revision which is known to work with Mercury 1.0 and the latest Aegir. I couldn't revert this wiki page to a previous date so this note will have to suffice.
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A wiki for getting Aegir installed on a Mercury instance.
Please feel free to update and add to it!

I'm going to try to consolidate the various wikis here that address the steps needed to create a Mercury EBS Boot Instance.

As far as I can tell these are the ones:

I have seen Munin mentioned as a desirable component in Mercury, and I'd like to add my vote. I've found it a really useful diagnostic tool.

I just went through the process of installing it using this tutorial: http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-monitoring-a-server-with-munin

Very straightforward. The only changes I needed to make where in the VirtualHost configuration for the monitoring site - I had to a) change the *:80 to *:8080 to accommodate Varnish, and b) use AuthUserFile rather than AuthDigestFile.

As many of you know, Ubuntu Lucid shipped with PHP 5.3 which is incompatible with many Drupal 6 modules. The solution the Mercury team decided on was to pin PHP to 5.2 until the situation with 5.3 was resolved. Mercury 1.1 has this built in.

We've added all php5 packages to the file and are hosting it here: http://pantheon-storage.chapterthree.com/lucid

6/18/10 - found a bug and update the above file and the list below (for some reason, changing php5-imagick, php-apc and php5-memcache to karmic-updates caused it to fail)
6/15/10 - added updates from http://groups.drupal.org/node/75003 (view that page if you're using aptitude rather than apt-get)

Search on Mercury provided by ApacheSolr and hosted in tomcat. Tomcat is running on port 80. When a request contains UTF-8 characters there are percent encoding and Tomcat can't deal with it by default. See : http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrTomcat#URI_Charset_Config

Quote :

If you are going to query Solr using international characters (>127) using HTTP-GET, you must configure Tomcat to conform to the URI standard by accepting percent-encoded UTF-8.

Edit Tomcat's conf/server.xml and add the following attribute to the correct Connector element: URIEncoding="UTF-8".

Drupal comes with a language negociation (D6: admin/settings/language/configure). One of the options is "path prefix with language fallback": If a suitable prefix is not identified, the display language is determined by the user's language preferences from the My Account page, or by the browser's language settings. The latter means it will look at Accept-Language in the http request and return the preferred language. I would like this still to work, together with Varnish cache.

This wiki describes setting up consistent snapshots for EBS. It works with RAID arrays and a single volume. It also can be automated to run on a cron job.

Step 1: EBS Consistent Snapshots Installation

Instructions for installing ec2-consistent-backup can be found here: http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot.

Set-up access to Alestic PPA


codename=$(lsb_release -cs)
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/alestic/ppa/ubuntu $codename main"|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/alestic-ppa.list

There are many things to keep updated on any server and Pantheon is no exception. Fortunately, we've provided some tools to help.

Notes:

As of 10.9.2010, Does not work. For some reason will get a WSOD if cron runs twice in a row without the site being hit.
As of 10.8.2010: (later in the day!) Seems to be working, get a white screen of death, run update.php from the browser

As of 10.8.2010: I am sure this document will need to change, but this is where I am at currently with this install.

My Goal is to have two or more Drupal Installs with Pantheon, on Ubuntu 10.04.

I want my document root to be /var/www/www.example.com/htdocs/