Deployment

This page could use a lot of work. For now, a few smaller deployment tips!

See also: http://docs.mediagoblin.org/deploying.html (some of which may belong here)

MongoDB setup

You should almost certainly run MongoDB with Journaling on if you have a new enough version of MongoDB. (If you don't, maybe you should get a newer version!) Without journaling there's some risk you could lose data that isn't yet written to disk if MongoDB is shut down incorrectly. But read about disk space below.

Also, keep in mind the following assumptions MongoDB makes about your deployment environment

• 64-bit machine
• little-endian
• more than one server
• speed is more important than reliability, and journaling is off by default (apparently that’s not true anymore, at least in 2.0, journaling is on and will preallocate gigabytes for the journal files, unless you enable the “smallfiles” option).)

FCGI script

This works great with the apache config example below :)

#!/path/to/mediagoblin/bin/python

# Written in 2011 by Christopher Allan Webber
#
# To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all
# copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the
# public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without any
# warranty.
# 
# You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along
# with this software. If not, see
# <http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>.

from paste.deploy import loadapp
from flup.server.fcgi import WSGIServer

CONFIG_PATH = '/path/to/mediagoblin/paste.ini'


def launch_fcgi():
    ccengine_wsgi_app = loadapp('config:' + CONFIG_PATH)
    WSGIServer(ccengine_wsgi_app).run()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    launch_fcgi()

Apache 2 Config with fcgid

Note that the libapache2-mod-fcgi in Debian is in the nonfree section, and MediaGoblin users will want to avoid that. Instead, libapache2-mod-fcgid can be used, but requires a slightly different configuration.

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName media.example.com
ServerAlias www.media.example.com

DocumentRoot /path/to/mediagoblin

Alias /mgoblin_static/ /path/to/mediagoblin/mediagoblin/static/
Alias /mgoblin_media/ /path/to/mediagoblin/user_dev/media/public/

# Rewrite all URLs to fcgi, except for static and media urls
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(mgoblin_static|mgoblin_media)($|/) - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /mg.fcgi/$1 [QSA,L]

# Allow access to static and media directories
<Directory /mgoblin_static>
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

<Directory /mgoblin_media>
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

<Directory /path/to/mediagoblin/>
        SetHandler fcgid-script
        Options +ExecCGI
        FcgidWrapper /path/to/mediagoblin/mg.fcgi
        order allow,deny
        allow from all
</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

Apache Config Example

This configuration example uses mod_fastcgi.

To install and enable mod_fastcgi on a Debian/Ubuntu based system:

# apt-get install libapache2-mod-suexec libapache2-mod-fastcgi
# a2enmod suexec
# a2enmod fastcgi

Sample configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName mediagoblin.yourdomain.tld
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdoimain.tld
DocumentRoot /var/www/
# Custom log files
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/mediagobling_access.log combined
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/mediagoblin_error.log

# Serve static and media files via alias
Alias /mgoblin_static/ /path/to/mediagoblin/mediagoblin/static/
Alias /mgoblin_media/ /path/to/mediagoblin/user_dev/media/public/

# Rewrite all URLs to fcgi, except for static and media urls
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(mgoblin_static|mgoblin_media)($|/) - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /mg.fcgi/$1 [QSA,L]

# Allow access to static and media directories
<Directory /path/to/mediagoblin/mediagoblin/static>
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>
<Directory /path/to/mediagoblin/mediagoblin/user_dev/media/public>
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

# Connect to fcgi server
FastCGIExternalServer /var/www/mg.fcgi -host 127.0.0.1:26543
</VirtualHost>

Then, you need to make sure mediagoblin is running in fcgi mode:

cd /path/to/mediagoblin
./lazyserver.sh --server-name=fcgi fcgi_host=127.0.0.1 fcgi_port=26543

Note: there may be several ways to improve this configuration

Juju

There is a juju charm available for deploying mediagoblin into EC2 or on your local box. juju is available in Ubuntu 11.10 and later, though it is recommended that you pull it from the juju PPA, which includes backported packages going back to Ubuntu 10.04. To use the juju charm, install juju and configure either the local provider or the EC2 provider. Make sure your environment is bootstrapped.

mkdir ~/charms
bzr init-repo ~/charms/oneiric
bzr branch lp:~clint-fewbar/charms/oneiric/mediagoblin/trunk ~/charms/oneiric/mediagoblin
juju deploy --repository ~/charms local:mediagoblin
juju expose mediagoblin

Currently the charm is very volatile, and deploys a single-server version of MediaGoblin only, but it will eventually relate to the existing juju charms for other supported data stores to allow one to scale out their MediaGoblin instance.