jorge's stompbox

Etherpad-lite, now easy to deploy for your events

Etherpad Lite is awesome. Have you ever organized a conference, large meeting, or foocamp and thought “wow, I could really have used an etherpad at this event.” But many times organizers don’t have the resources to get this kind of stuff running. Now, in an effort to make it trivial for anyone to set up an etherpad, James has implemented an etherpad lite formula for ensemble.

Here are the steps. First install and configure Ensemble, this is just putting your AWS keys in an environment file and/or using a PPA if you’re not on 11.10. Then we bootstrap, snag James’ formula, and then deploy it in EC2.

ensemble bootstrap
bzr branch lp:~ensemble-composers/+junk/etherpad-lite
ensemble deploy --repository= . etherpad-lite

Right now we’re grabbing formulas from Launchpad but in the future that will be much more user friendly, where you can search for formulas right from the ensemble command (Like apt-cache search). It takes about 5 minutes to bootstrap, and then another 5-10 minutes to deploy, since it’s installing everything we need for Etherpad Lite and then installing it on EC2.

Then let’s check in how that’s going with:

ensemble status

2011-08-30 13:24:33,166 INFO Connecting to environment.
machines:
  0: {dns-name: ec2-107-20-19-203.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-6b706b0a}
  1: {dns-name: ec2-107-20-7-236.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-8f6b70ee}
services:
  etherpad-lite:
    formula: local:etherpad-lite-5
    relations: {}
    units:
      etherpad-lite/0:
        machine: 1
        relations: {}
        state: started
2011-08-30 13:24:35,883 INFO 'status' command finished successfully

Ok as we can see there the service has state:started, which means it’s running. Node 1 is our instance so let’s hit it up, we hit up port 9001 because that’s the Etherpad Lite’s default port:

http://ec2-50-17-151-64.compute-1.amazonaws.com:9001/

Neat huh? Ok so I don’t have a fancy URL like pad.socallinuxexpo.org (Hint hint Gareth!) but you get the idea. I’ll leave it running for a while so you can mess with it. When your conference is done, save your data and tear it all down with

ensemble shutdown

or keep it around, up to you.

Currently it’s only running in a single instance, there’s no logic in the formula for load balancing or anything yet, but James tells me it scales pretty nicely on just once instance. You’ll also note that I don’t have to know/care about building node.js or npm or any of those dependencies. The formula author basically does the work for everyone, ONCE, and then people like me who aren’t familiar with deploying this sort of app can just enjoy using Etherpad Lite.

Ok so now $your_favorite_event can have an etherpad very easily. We’ve already made it easy to get mediawiki, it’s my hope that eventually we’ll have formulas for every service a conference would need to get running so they can just fire it up.

This is just an example on the public cloud, later on we’ll show you how to deploy to bare metal using these exact commands.