Deploying BadgeYaY with Docker on Docker Cloud

We already have a Dockerfile present in the repository but  there is problem in many lines of code.I studied about Docker and learned how It is deployed and I am now going to explain how I deployed BadgeYaY on Docker Cloud.

To make deploying of Badgeyay easier we are now supporting Docker based installation.

Before we start to deploy, let’s have a quick brief about what is docker and how it works ?

What is Docker ?

Docker is an open-source technology that allows you create, deploy, and run applications using containers. Docker allows you deploy technologies with many underlying components that must be installed and configured in a single, containerized instance.Docker makes it easier to create and deploy applications in an isolated environment.

Now, let’s start with how to deploy on docker cloud:

Step 1 – Installing Docker

Get the latest version of docker. See the offical site for installation info for your platform.

Step 2 – Create Dockerfile

With Docker, we can just grab a portable Python runtime as an image, no installation necessary. Then, our build can include the base Python image right alongside our app code, ensuring that our app, its dependencies, and the runtime, all travel together.

These portable images are defined by something called a Dockerfile.

In DockerFile, there are all the commands a user could call on the command line to assemble an image. Here’s is the Dockerfile of BadgeYaY.

# The FROM instruction initializes a new build stage and sets the Base Image for subsequent instructions.
FROM python:3.6

# We copy just the requirements.txt first to leverage Docker cache
COPY ./app/requirements.txt /app/


# The WORKDIR instruction sets the working directory for any RUN, CMD, ENTRYPOINT, COPY and ADD instructions that follow it in the Dockerfile.
WORKDIR /app


# The RUN instruction will execute any commands in a new layer on top of the current image and commit the results.
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt


# The COPY instruction copies new files.
COPY . /app


# An ENTRYPOINT allows you to configure a container that will run as an executable.
ENTRYPOINT [ "python" ]

# The main purpose of a CMD is to provide defaults for an executing container.
CMD [ "main.py" ]

 

Step 3 – Build New Docker Image

sudo docker build -t badgeyay:latest .

 

When the command completed successfully, we can check the new image with the docker command below:

     sudo docker images

 

Step 4 – Run the app

Let’s run the app in the background, in detached mode:

 sudo docker run -d -p 5000:5000 badgeyay

 

We get the long container ID for our app and then are kicked back to our terminal.Our container is running in the background.Now use docker container stop to end the process, using the CONTAINER ID, like so :

 

docker container stop 1fa4ab2cf395

 

Step 5 – Publish the app.

Log in to the Docker public registry on your local machine.

docker login

 

Upload your tagged image to the repository:

docker push username/repository:tag

 

From now on, we can use docker run and run our app on any machine. No matter where docker run executes, it pulls your image, along with Python and all the dependencies from requirements.txt, and runs your code. It all travels together in a neat little package, and the host machine doesn’t have to install anything but Docker to run it.

Docker Cloud

Docker Cloud provides a hosted registry service with build and testing facilities for Dockerized application images; tools to help you set up and manage host infrastructure; and application lifecycle features to automate deploying (and redeploying) services created from images.

In BadgeYaY, we  also have a Deploy button button which directly deploys on Docker cloud with a single click .

The related PR of this work is https://github.com/fossasia/badgeyay/pull/401 .

Resources :

  • Docker documentation: Link
  • Get Started With Docker: Link
Continue ReadingDeploying BadgeYaY with Docker on Docker Cloud

Speeding up the Travis Build to Decrease the Building Time

Meilix is the repository which uses build script to generate community version of lubuntu as LXQT Desktop. It usually takes around 25-26 to build and deploy the ISO as a Github Release on master branch.
Observing the build log we can see that there are most of the packages like debootstrap, squashfs-tool, etc which are being fetch and setup at the time of building which results in increasing build time.

The issue is to decrease the build time supplying the packages from Travis so that when we run build.sh we won’t be required to download them again and thus few minutes will get reduced.
We included list of packages to be pre-downloaded in .travis.yml

include:
  - os: linux
    addons:
      apt:
        sources:
          - ubuntu-toolchain-r-test
        packages:
          - debootstrap
          - genisoimage
          - p7zip-full
          - squashfs-tools
          - ubuntu-dev-tools
          - dpkg-dev
          - debhelper
          - fakeroot
          - devscripts

These are some important packages included in the build.sh  as devtools=”debootstrap genisoimage p7zip-full squashfs-tools ubuntu-dev-tools” which are always fetched, so we included it into .travis.yml and downloaded it before entering into the chroot environment. By specifying those packages in the .travis.yml, Travis provides those packages beforehand into the docker container so it will run our script. Since the scripts also include package then when the script runs apt-get it won’t download those packages again. They are specified outside the chroot environment because they are expected to be at the system the build.sh script is run to get the iso. By this way, we get a sharp decrease in build time as the internet in the Travis CI container is not so fast so the package download time can be avoided. Now the build is taking around 15-16 minutes to build and deploy.

One thing to note that we didn’t remove those packages off build.sh so that build.sh works outside Travis CI as well.

References:
Pull #176 by @abishekvashok
Speeding up Travis Build by Travis CI
Faster Build by atchai.com

Continue ReadingSpeeding up the Travis Build to Decrease the Building Time

Creating A Dockerfile For Yacy Grid MCP

The YaCy Grid is the second-generation implementation of YaCy, a peer-to-peer search engine. A YaCy Grid installation consists of a set of micro-services which communicate with each other using a common infrastructure for data persistence. The task was to deploy the second-generation of YaCy Grid. To do so, we first had created a Dockerfile. This dockerfile should start the micro services such as rabbitmq, Apache ftp and elasticsearch in one docker instance along with MCP. The microservices perform following tasks:

  • Apache ftp server for asset storage.
  • RabbitMQ message queues for the message system.
  • Elasticsearch for database operations.

To launch these microservices using Dockerfile, we referred to following documentations regarding running these services locally: https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/blob/master/README.md

For creating a Dockerfile we proceeded as follows:

FROM ubuntu:latest
MAINTAINER Harshit Prasad# Update
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get upgrade -y# add packages
# install jdk package for java
RUN apt-get install -y git openjdk-8-jdk

#install gradle required for build
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y software-properties-common
RUN add-apt-repository ppa:cwchien/gradle
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y wget
RUN wget https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-3.4.1-bin.zip
RUN mkdir /opt/gradle
RUN apt-get install -y unzip
RUN unzip -d /opt/gradle gradle-3.4.1-bin.zip
RUN PATH=$PATH:/opt/gradle/gradle-3.4.1/bin
ENV GRADLE_HOME=/opt/gradle/gradle-3.4.1
ENV PATH=$PATH:$GRADLE_HOME/bin
RUN gradle -v

# install apache ftp server 1.1.0
RUN wget http://www-eu.apache.org/dist/mina/ftpserver/1.1.0/dist/apache-ftpserver-1.1.0.tar.gz
RUN tar xfz apache-ftpserver-1.1.0.tar.gz

# install RabbitMQ server
RUN wget https://www.rabbitmq.com/releases/rabbitmq-server/v3.6.6/rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-3.6.6.tar.xz
RUN tar xf rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-3.6.6.tar.xz

# install erlang language for RabbitMQ
RUN apt-get install -y erlang

# install elasticsearch
RUN wget https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-5.5.0.tar.gz
RUN sha1sum elasticsearch-5.5.0.tar.gz
RUN tar -xzf elasticsearch-5.5.0.tar.gz

# clone yacy_grid_mcp repository
RUN git clone https://github.com/nikhilrayaprolu/yacy_grid_mcp.git
WORKDIR /yacy_grid_mcp

RUN cat docker/configftp.properties > ../apacheftpserver1.1.0/res/conf/users.properties

# compile
RUN gradle build
RUN mkdir data/mcp-8100/conf/ -p
RUN cp docker/config-mcp.properties data/mcp-8100/conf/config.properties
RUN chmod +x ./docker/start.sh

# Expose web interface ports
# 2121: ftp, a FTP server to be used for mass data / file storage
# 5672: rabbitmq, a rabbitmq message queue server to be used for global messages, queues and stacks
# 9300: elastic, an elasticsearch server or main cluster address for global database storage
EXPOSE 2121 5672 9300 9200 15672 8100

# Define default command.
ENTRYPOINT [“/bin/bash”, “./docker/start.sh”]

 

We have created a start.sh file to start RabbitMQ and Apache FTP services. At the end, for compilation gradle run will be executed.

adduser –disabled-password –gecos ” r
adduser r sudo
echo ‘%sudo ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL’ >> /etc/sudoers
chmod a+rwx /elasticsearch-5.5.0 -R
su -m r -c ‘/elasticsearch-5.5.0/bin/elasticsearch -Ecluster.name=yacygrid &’
cd /apacheftpserver1.1.0
./bin/ftpd.sh res/conf/ftpdtypical.xml &
/rabbitmq_server-3.6.6/sbin/rabbitmq-server -detached
sleep 5s;
/rabbitmq_server-3.6.6/sbin/rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management
/rabbitmq_server3.6.6/sbin/rabbitmqctl add_user yacygrid password4account
echo [{rabbit, [{loopback_users, []}]}]. >> /rabbitmq_server-3.6.6/etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.config
/rabbitmq_server-3.6.6/sbin/rabbitmqctl set_permissions -p / yacygrid “.*” “.*” “.*”
cd /yacy_grid_mcp
sleep 5s;
gradle run

 

start.sh will first add username and then password. Then it will start RabbitMQ along with Apache FTP.  For username and password, we have created a separate files to configure their properties during Docker run which can be found here:

The logic behind running all the microservices in one docker instance was: creating each container for microservice and then link those containers with the help of docker-compose.yml file.

The Dockerfile which we have created was corresponding to one image. Another image was elasticsearch which was linked to this Dockerfile. The latest version of elasticsearch image was already available on their site: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/docker.html

We configured the docker-compose.yml file according to the reference link provided above. The docker-compose file can be found here: https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/blob/master/docker/docker-compose.yml

The source code for the implementation of whole structure can be found here: https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/tree/master/docker

Resources

 

Continue ReadingCreating A Dockerfile For Yacy Grid MCP

Continuous Integration and Deployment of Yacy Grid

We have deployed Yacy Grid on Google cloud recently, and we have achieved this using kubernetes and Travis for auto deployment.

How we have deployed it:

Firstly, it is advised to have different containers for each service your application requires, and follow a multi container architecture. Using multi container architecture you can allocate fixed size of power to each application and also replicate individual services, whichever is required. Presently, Yacy has two main applications which are required to be deployed in separate containers – Yacy_grid_mcp and ElasticSearch.

We took the official kubernetes YAML files of ElasticSearch and followed the instructions at https://github.com/kubernetes/examples/blob/master/staging/elasticsearch/README.md for deployment of elastic search on the google cloud.

With this we are able to run pods, volumes required for elastic search and services for connecting Yacy with elastic search.

The pull request regarding deployment of separate elasticsearch component is at https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/pull/27/files

Below figure shows different services and external endpoints present pods use for elastic search.

Now elastic search can be accessed at 35.202.154.219:9300 and http://35.193.124.253:9200/

Continuous deployment of Yacy_grid_mcp:

Please make sure that you have created a cluster on google container engine for deploying our containers on it. Regarding starting a project and cluster please read https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/docs/

1.Initially, Travis.yml initiates and sets up the required environment for Yacy deployment by installing Google cloud cli and kubectl components.

Source code regarding the Travis setup could be found at https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/blob/master/.travis.yml

2.Later Travis runs the depoy_staging.sh file, which builds the docker image of yacy o the present build and pushes it to hub.docker.com

if [ "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" != "false" -o "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" != "$SOURCE_BRANCH" ]; then
    echo "Skipping deploy; The request or commit is not on master"
    exit 0
fi

set -e

docker build -t nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp:$TRAVIS_COMMIT ./docker
docker login -u="$DOCKER_USERNAME" -p="$DOCKER_PASSWORD"
docker tag nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp:$TRAVIS_COMMIT nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp:latest
docker push nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp

Later with service key, we authenticate with google cloud and set the required environments and variables

echo $GCLOUD_SERVICE   base64 --decode -i > ${HOME}/gcloud-service-key.json
gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file ${HOME}/gcloud-service-key.json

gcloud --quiet config set project $PROJECT_NAME_STG
gcloud --quiet config set container/cluster $CLUSTER_NAME_STG
gcloud --quiet config set compute/zone ${CLOUDSDK_COMPUTE_ZONE}
gcloud --quiet container clusters get-credentials $CLUSTER_NAME_STG

And Later we push the docker image built to google cloud and deploy it

kubectl config view
kubectl config current-context

kubectl set image deployment/${KUBE_DEPLOYMENT_NAME} ${KUBE_DEPLOYMENT_CONTAINER_NAME}=nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp:$TRAVIS_COMMIT

Presently Yacy runs on 5vCPUs

With the following pods and services:

Also one can use kubectl cli for getting information regarding the cluster and pods as shown below

Pull request regarding deployment of yacy on google cloud is available at: https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/pull/16/files

References:

1.A Medium Blog on CD to Google Container: https://medium.com/google-cloud/continuous-delivery-in-a-microservice-infrastructure-with-google-container-engine-docker-and-fb9772e81da7

2.Another Blog on CD to Google Container: https://engineering.hexacta.com/automatic-deployment-of-multiple-docker-containers-to-google-container-engine-using-travis-e5d9e191d5ad

3.Deploying ElasticSearch to Cloud using Kubernetes: https://github.com/kubernetes/examples/blob/master/staging/elasticsearch/README.md

Continue Reading

Optimising Docker Images for loklak Server

The loklak server is in a process of moving to Kubernetes. In order to do so, we needed to have different Docker images that suit these deployments. In this blog post, I will be discussing the process through which I optimised the size of Docker image for these deployments.

Initial Image

The image that I started with used Ubuntu as base. It installed all the components needed and then modified the configurations as required –

FROM ubuntu:latest

# Env Vars
ENV LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ENV JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Dfile.encoding=UTF8
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive

WORKDIR /loklak_server

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get upgrade -y
RUN apt-get install -y git openjdk-8-jdk
RUN git clone https://github.com/loklak/loklak_server.git /loklak_server
RUN git checkout development
RUN ./gradlew build -x test -x checkstyleTest -x checkstyleMain -x jacocoTestReport
RUN sed -i.bak 's/^\(port.http=\).*/\180/' conf/config.properties
... # More configurations
RUN echo "while true; do sleep 10;done" >> bin/start.sh

# Start
CMD ["bin/start.sh", "-Idn"]

The size of images built using this Dockerfile was quite huge –

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED              SIZE

loklak_server       latest              a92f506b360d        About a minute ago   1.114 GB

ubuntu              latest              ccc7a11d65b1        3 days ago           120.1 MB

But since this size is not acceptable, we needed to reduce it.

Moving to Apline

Alpine Linux is an extremely lightweight Linux distro, built mainly for the container environment. Its size is so tiny that it hardly puts any impact on the overall size of images. So, I replaced Ubuntu with Alpine –

FROM alpine:latest

...
RUN apk update
RUN apk add git openjdk8 bash
...

And now we had much smaller images –

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE

loklak_server       latest              54b507ee9187        17 seconds ago      668.8 MB

alpine              latest              7328f6f8b418        6 weeks ago         3.966 MB

As we can see that due to no caching and small size of Alpine, the image size is reduced to almost half the original.

Reducing Content Size

There are many things in a project which are no longer needed while running the project, like the .git folder (which is huge in case of loklak) –

$ du -sh loklak_server/.git
236M loklak_server/.git

We can remove such files from the Docker image and save a lot of space –

rm -rf .[^.] .??*

Optimizing Number of Layers

The number of layers also affect the size of the image. More the number of layers, more will be the size of image. In the Dockerfile, we can club together the RUN commands for lower number of images.

RUN apk update && apk add openjdk8 git bash && \
  git clone https://github.com/loklak/loklak_server.git /loklak_server && \
  ...

After this, the effective size is again reduced by a major factor –

REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE

loklak_server       latest              54b507ee9187        17 seconds ago      422.3 MB

alpine              latest              7328f6f8b418        6 weeks ago         3.966 MB

Conclusion

In this blog post, I discussed the process of optimising the size of Dockerfile for Kubernetes deployments of loklak server. The size was reduced to 426 MB from 1.234 GB and this provided much faster push/pull time for Docker images, and therefore, faster updates for Kubernetes deployments.

Resources

Continue ReadingOptimising Docker Images for loklak Server

Deploying Yacy with Docker on Different Cloud Platforms

To make deploying of yacy easier we are now supporting Docker based installation.

Following the steps below one could successfully run Yacy on docker.

  1. You can pull the image of Yacy from https://hub.docker.com/r/nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp/ or buid it on your own with the docker file present at https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/blob/master/docker/Dockerfile

One could pull the docker image using command:

docker pull nikhilrayaprolu/yacygridmcp

 

2) Once you have an image of yacygridmcp you can run it by typing

docker run <image_name>

 

You can access the yacygridmcp endpoint at localhost:8100

Installation of Yacy on cloud servers:

Installing Yacy and all microservices with just one command:

  • One can also download,build and run Yacy and all its microservices (presently supported are yacy_grid_crawler, yacy_grid_loader, yacy_grid_ui, yacy_grid_parser, and yacy_grid_mcp )
  • To build all these microservices in one command, run this bash script productiondeployment.sh
    • `bash productiondeployment.sh build` will install all required dependencies and build microservices by cloning them from github repositories.
    • `bash productiondeployment.sh run` will run all services and starts them.
    • Right now all repositories are cloned into ~/yacy and you can make customisations and your own changes to this code and build your own customised yacy.

The related PRs of this work are https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/pull/21 and https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/pull/20 and https://github.com/yacy/yacy_grid_mcp/pull/13

Resources:

Continue ReadingDeploying Yacy with Docker on Different Cloud Platforms

Auto Deployment of SUSI Server using Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform

Recently, we auto deployed SUSI Server on Google Cloud Platform using Kubernetes and Docker Images after each commit in the GitHub repo with the help of Travis Continuous Integration. So, basically, whenever a new commit is added to the repo, during the Travis build, we build the docker image of the server and then use it to deploy the server on Google Cloud Platform. We use Kubernetes for deployment since it is very easy to scale up the Project when traffic on the server is increased and Docker because using it we can easily build docker images which then can be used to update the deployment. This schematic will make things more clear what exactly is the procedure.

Prerequisites

  1. You must be signed in to your Google Cloud Console and have enabled billing and must have credits left in your account.
  2. You must have a docker account and a repo in it. If you don’t have one, make it now.
  3. You should have enabled Travis on your repo and have a Travis.yml file in your repo.
  4. You must already have a project in Google Cloud Console. Make a new one if you don’t have.

Pre Deployment Steps

You will be needed to do some work on Google Cloud Platform before actually starting the auto deployment process. Those are:

  1. Creating a new Cluster.
  2. Adding and Formatting Persistence Disk
  3. Adding a Persistent Volume CLaim (PVC)
  4. Labeling a node as primary.

Check out this documentation on how to do that. It may help.

Implementation

Img src: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/continuous-delivery-with-travis-ci

1. The first step is simply to add this line in Travis.yml file and create an empty deploy.sh, file mentioned below.

after_success:
- bash kubernetes/travis/deploy.sh

Now we’ll be moving line by line and adding commands in the empty deploy.sh file that we created in the previous step.

2. Next step is to remove obsolete Google Cloud files and install Google Cloud SDK and kubectl command. Use following lines to do that.

echo ">>> Removing obsolete gcoud files"
sudo rm -f /usr/bin/git-credential-gcloud.sh
sudo rm -f /usr/bin/bq
sudo rm -f /usr/bin/gsutil
sudo rm -f /usr/bin/gcloud

echo ">>> Installing new files"
curl https://sdk.cloud.google.com | bash;
source ~/.bashrc
gcloud components install kubectl

3. In this step you will be needed to download a JSON file which contains your Google Cloud Credentials, then copy that file to your repo and encrypt it using Travis encryption keys. Follow https://youtu.be/7U4jjRw_AJk this video to see how to do that.

4. So, now you have added your encrypted credentials.json files in your repo and now you need to use those credentials to login into your google cloud account. So, use below lines to do that.

echo ">>> Decrypting credentials and authenticating gcloud account"
# Decrypt the credentials we added to the repo using the key we added with the Travis command line tool
openssl aes-256-cbc -K $encrypted_YOUR_key -iv $encrypted_YOUR_iv -in ./kubernetes/travis/Credentials.json.enc -out Credentials.json -d
gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file Credentials.json
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=$(pwd)/Credentials.json
#add gcoud project id
gcloud config set project YOUR_PROJECT_ID
gcloud container clusters get-credentials YOUR_CONTAINER

The above lines of code first decrypt your credentials, then login into your account and set the project you already created earlier.

5. Now, we have logged into Google Cloud, we need to build docker image from a dockerfile. Follow official docker docs to see how to write a dockerfile. Here is an example of dockerfile. You will need to add “$DOCKER_USERNAME” and “$DOCKER_PASSWORD” as environment variables in Travis settings of your repo.

echo ">>> Building Docker image"
cd kubernetes/images

docker build --no-cache -t YOUR_DOCKER_USERNAME/YOUR_DOCKER_REPO:$TRAVIS_COMMIT .
docker login -u="$DOCKER_USERNAME" -p="$DOCKER_PASSWORD"
docker tag YOUR_DOCKER_USERNAME/YOUR_DOCKER_REPO:$TRAVIS_COMMIT YOUR_DOCKER_USERNAME/YOUR_DOCKER_REPO:latest

6. Now, just push the docker image created in previous step and update the deployment.

echo ">>> Pushing docker image"
docker push YOUR_DOCKER_USERNAME/YOUR_DOCKER_REPO

echo ">>> Updating deployment"
kubectl set image deployment/YOUR_CONTAINER_NAME --namespace=default YOUR_CONTAINER_NAME=YOUR_DOCKER_USERNAME/YOUR_DOCKER_REPO:$TRAVIS_COMMIT

Summary

This blog was about how we have configured travis build and auto deployed SUSI Server on Google Cloud Platform using Kubernetes and Docker. You can do the same with your server too or if you are looking to contribute to SUSI Server, this may help you a little in understanding the code of the repo.

Resources

  1. The documentation for setting up your project on Google CLoud Console before starting auto deployment https://github.com/fossasia/susi_server/blob/afb00cd9c421876f5d640ce87941e502aa52e004/docs/installation/installation_kubernetes_gcloud.md
  2. The documentation for encrypting your google cloud credentials and adding them to your repo https://cloud.google.com/solutions/continuous-delivery-with-travis-ci
  3. Docs for Docker to get you started with Docker https://docs.docker.com/
  4. Travis Documentation on how to secure your credentials https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/encryption-keys/
  5. Travis Documentation on how to add environment variables in your repo settings https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/environment-variables/
Continue ReadingAuto Deployment of SUSI Server using Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform

How to use Digital Ocean and Docker to setup Test CMS for Phimpme

One of the core feature of Phimpme app is sharing images to other different accounts, including various open source CMS such as WordPress, Drupal etc and other open source data storage account such as OwnCloud, NextCloud etc.

One can not have everything at place, but for development and testing purpose it is required in our end. So problem I was facing to get things done in most optimize way. I thought setting things on hosted server would be good, because it saves lots of time in setting locally in our system, adding all the dependencies. And also we cannot share the account as it is limited to our local environment.

Digital Ocean caught my attention in providing hosting service. It is very easy to use with their droplet creation. Select as per your system requirement and service requirement, the droplet will be ready in few moments and we can use it anywhere.

Note: DigitalOcean is a paid service. Student can use Github Education Pack for free credits on Digital Ocean. I used the same.

I currently worked on Nextcloud integration so here in this blog I will tell how to quickly create nextcloud server using Digital Ocean and Docker.

Step 1: Creating Droplet

DigitalOcean completely work on droplets and one can anytime create and destroy different droplets associated with their account.

Choose an Image

So there are three options of choosing the image of Droplet.

Distributions : Which is other operating systems you want to use

One Click app: It is a very good feature as it creates everything for use in just one click. But again, it doesn’t provide everything, like there is no NextCloud. That’s why I used docker to take its image.

Snapshots: This is if you saved your droplet already, so it will pick it and creates similar to the saved image. Here I selected Docker from one-click apps section.

Selecting the size

This is for selecting the size of the server we are creating, For small development purpose $5 plan is good. There is a good thing in DigitalOcean as it didn’t charge on the monthly basis to the use. It works on hourly basis and charge according to that. Also providing the SSD Disk for fast IO operations.

Choose a datacenter Region

Add SSH

This is very important to add a ssh key. Otherwise you have to setup root password or used the shell they provide. To work on your computer terminal, its good that you setup an ssh key already and it to the account.

How to get ssh key in your system: https://help.github.com/

Rename the number of droplet and name of the droplet and create.

Now it will show there in your droplet section

Step 2: Access the Server

As we have already added the ssh key to our droplet. Now we can access it from our terminal. Open the terminal and type this

➜  ~ ssh root@<your IP> 

It will logged in to you

root@docker-512mb-blr1-01:~# 

Our objective is setting a NextCloud Account.

Here now I will use Docker. Firstly, What is Docker?

Go here to read: https://www.docker.com/what-docker

I will explain docker in other words. Like I setted up everything which I need. Now If I have to destroy this all and want to use it after some days. Or if my friends wants to use the setted platform. What is the option here?

Recreate and everything everytime? NO.

Just create docker image, save it pull the image when you want, and run it to serve on the serve. Your friends need, provide them the docker image.

Isn’t it cool and much time saving.

Browse the Docker Hub

In the hub we can find docker images for various platforms officially maintained by the authors.

Nextcloud have their official account on Docker to provide latest images to the developers.

Here is the link : https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud/

Pull the image in your server.

root@docker-512mb-blr1-01:~# docker pull nextcloud
Using default tag: latest
latest: Pulling from library/nextcloud
9f0706ba7422: Pull complete
4c407763908f: Pull complete
82e2bc3a45c1: Pull complete
c84e1013aed1: Pull complete
a3b5e03d7e24: Pull complete
917f836a88be: Pull complete
b2dc54431819: Pull complete
a60b574790b8: Pull complete
49ef0f1aff88: Pull complete
7773a865ee49: Pull complete
9e0e5cc56a9d: Pull complete
bfade1c7421e: Pull complete
ece8ceb33bed: Pull complete
c691d2747a3e: Pull complete
4b5e96bf54c9: Pull complete
6fbe30ae456b: Pull complete
e0c534b35a6b: Pull complete
4d2687f4b6f3: Pull complete
00197422846a: Pull complete
6ab57168c49c: Pull complete
9e1260db005f: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:1bb5c256f19dcec60d8468c00bc7dc74efdf93390666cb82e20bcacbbbd9746c
Status: Downloaded newer image for nextcloud:latest
root@docker-512mb-blr1-01:~#

Following the documentation

I need to run this command $ docker run -d -p 8080:80 nextcloud

It serves the account on localhost.

Check on your https://<IP>:8080

So in this way I easily setup different account for testing and integration purpose in Phimpme Android app. It really saves lots of time and speed up the process.

You can easily destroy the droplet after work is done.

Student can use the free credits from GitHub Education Pack.

Source:

 

Continue ReadingHow to use Digital Ocean and Docker to setup Test CMS for Phimpme

Deploying SUSI.AI with Docker

Docker is much more efficient than VM in allocating shared resources between various containers as shown in figure. To deploy SUSI we need to create docker container. There are two ways to build it. First way is fork the SUSI project in github. Then you can signup in dockerhub and create autobuild docker container. The second way is to manually build docker file from command prompt of your computer. The following instructions needs to be executed in cloud shell or linux machine.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get -y install docker.io
sudo fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
sudo docker build https://github.com/fossasia/susi_server.git


The first three commands install docker software to the machine. Next three lines give required permissions and execution abilities to docker. Final command builds docker container from github. Thus, We have successfully made docker container. We can deploy it on the cloud by using following command.

sudo docker run -d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 susi


Deploying Susi on cloud with kubernetes

We will use Google Cloud Service platform for demonstration. Create your GCS account. Goto dashboard and click on compute engine.

Enable Billing and Create New Project named XYZ. Open the terminal, by clicking the Google cloud shell button on the top.

Please set the compute zone to your nearest zone by running the below command.

gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1-a


Now we need to create cluster, on which we deploy susi app. We do it by this command.

gcloud container clusters create hello-cluster --num-nodes=3


We need to get docker from dockerhub and push it to our project repo.We do it by these commands.

sudo docker pull jyothiraditya/susi_server
gcloud docker -- push <image-id> gcr.io/<project-id>/<name>

We run the docker image on cluster by following commands.

kubectl run susi-server --image=gcr.io/<project-id>/<name> --port=80
kubectl get pods

We expose the container to external traffic, with help of load balancer by the following command.

kubectl expose deployment susi-server --type="LoadBalancer --port=80"


We get the external ip-address to access susi from browser. By entering

kubectl get service susi-server


You can now view the app by going to “EXTERNAL-IP:80”.

References : Docker build , Kubernetes deployment, Google cloud deployment 

 

Continue ReadingDeploying SUSI.AI with Docker

sTeam GSoC 2016 Windup

(ˢᵒᶜⁱᵉᵗʸserver) aims to be a platform for developing collaborative applications.
sTeam server project repository: sTeam.
sTeam-REST API repository: sTeam-REST

An overview of the work done by ajinkya007 during Google Summer of code 2016 with FOSSASIA on its project sTeam.

The community bonding period saw the creation of a docker image and a debian package for the sTeam server. The integration of the sTeam shell into vi, improvements in the export and import to git scripts, user and group manipulation commands, sending mails through the commandline, viewing logs and the edit script modifications were done subsequently. The later part of GSOC saw that the sTeam-rest repository was restructured, unit and api-end point tests were performed. The new web interface developed was tested.
The code written during this period by me and siddhant was merged and the conflicts were resolved. The merged code was tested thoroughly as no automated test integration tool supports pike programming language. Documentation was generated using Doxygen and deployed in the gh-pages of the sTeam server repository.

A trello board was maintained throughout the course of GSOC 2016.

Trello Board: sTeam

Accomplishments

Issues Reported and Resolved

A list of tasks covered and all the Pull requests related to each:

Tasks Issue PR
Make changes in the Makefile for installation of sTeam. Issue-25 Issue-27 PR-66 PR-67
Edit script modifications Issue-20 Issue-29 Issue-43 PR-44 PR-48
Indentation of output in steal-shell. Issue-24 PR-42
Integrate steam-shell into vim or emacs. Issue-37 Issue-43 Issue-49 PR-41 PR-48 PR-51
Improve the import and export from git scripts. Issue-9 Issue-14 Issue-16 Issue-18 Issue-19 Issue-46 PR-45 PR-54 PR-55 PR-76
Create, Delete and List the user through commandline Issue-58 Issue-69 Issue-72 PR-59 PR-70 PR-78
Sending Mails through commandline Issue-74 PR-85
Generate error logs and display them in CLI Issue-83 PR-86
Create a file of any mime type from command line. Issue-79 PR-82
Add more commands for group operations. Issue-80 PR-84
Add more utility to the steam-shell Issue-56 Issue-71 Issue-73 PR-57 PR-75 PR-81
Restructure the sTeam-rest repository List of Issue’s List of PR’s
Write test cases to test sTeam-rest api List of Issue’s List of PR’s
Create a debian package and a docker image for easy deployment Create docker image Docker Image
Document the work done Issue 149 sTeam Server Structure, sTeam Server Documentation
Test the web-interface

Commits Merged

During the course of GSOC 2016, work was done on the sTeam and sTeam-rest repositories.

1. The work done on the sTeam repository.

We have combined all the work into two branches for the ease of creating a debian package. The commits made by me in each branch can be seen here.

2. The work done on the sTeam-rest repository

The push request’s sent for the issue’s are yet to be merged in the main repository. The list of PR’s for the sTeam-rest repository.

sTeam-rest PR’s

The weekly blogs

The blogs summarizing the work done during the week were published on my personal website. These can be found on Weekly Blogs
All the blogs can also be found on the Fossasia blog.
The list in reverse chronological order is as follows.

Scrums

Scrum reports were posted on the #steam-devel on irc.freenode.net and sTeam google group. The sTeam trello board also has everyday scrum reports.

Further Improvements

  1. sTeam command line lacks the functionality to read and set the object access permissions. sTeam function analogous to getfacl() to change the sTeam server object permisssions.
  2. sTeam debian package for easy installation of the sTeam server. The debian package is yet to be fully packaged.

Special Thanks

  • I would like to thank my mentors Mario Behling, Hong Phuc Dang, Martin Bahr, Trilok Tourani and my peers for being there to help me and guide me.
  • I would like to thank FOSSASIA, sTeam and Pike Community for giving me this opportunity and guiding me in this endeavour.
  • I would also like to thank Google Summer of Code for this experience.

Feel free to explore the repository. Suggestions for improvements are welcomed.

Checkout the FOSSASIA Idea’s page for more information on projects supported by FOSSASIA.

Continue ReadingsTeam GSoC 2016 Windup