Out-of-date article warning

This article dating from 2013 is not valid anymore. The exoscale-wordpress repository doesn’t work on Puppet 5.x and Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04) was EOL’d on April 28, 2017.

Each programming language has its “Hello World” tutorial. In the cloud provider business, the benchmarking is often done on a simple application deployment. Wordpress is such an application used to guide users as a first hands on experience. We have created our own Wordpress deployment example, but done so in a slightly more disruptive way.

Whereas traditional Virtual Private Servers tutorials lists pages of scripts and console windows, ours is just 15 lines. The trick is to let Puppet, a configuration management tool, do the job. This example will not deploy a clone of a Wordpress installation, but a fresh and latest copy of the famous blogging engine.

Principles:

This cookbook will leverage userdata extensibility of our Apache CloudStack powered Open Cloud offering and the features of cloud-init to bootstrap a fully operational Wordpress install which IS NOT a clone.

  • Userdata will be filled with a script
  • Script will be called on first boot by cloud-init
  • A puppet repository will be pulled on the instance
  • The script will launch Puppet and apply the manifest and eventually after PHP, Nginx and MySQL installation pull a fresh copy of Wordpress and install it.

Keep it mind that it is possible to go much further in automation deployment.

Anyway, here is the usage guide from the README section of the project on Github or see for yourself with this simple article:

Usage guide:

Start an instance

Launch a new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS instance with the service offering you wish. Insert it in a security group or with firewall rules which enable port 80/http.

User Data with Cloud-init

In the User Data tab, input the script below:

#!/bin/sh
set -e -x

apt-get --yes --quiet update
apt-get --yes --quiet install git puppet-common

#
# Fetch puppet configuration from public git repository.
#

mv /etc/puppet /etc/puppet.orig
git clone https://github.com/exoscale/exoscale-wordpress.git /etc/puppet

#
# Run puppet.
#

puppet apply /etc/puppet/manifests/init.pp

Start using your fresh Wordpress

Point your browser to your instance public IP address and you should be asked for an admin email and password.