Calagator installer package-y thing

[camo]

Hi all,
I'm setting up Calagator to test out and was wondering how to go about
writing an installer for non-tech people, somewhat like the Wordpress
installer or other similar web interface installs. If Calagator is the
best solution for the problem, I want to be able to hand it over to
other people who can help to maintain it.

Cameron

[Igal Koshevoy]

Thanks for the interest, you're welcome to try this.

However, I feel the energy needed to do this would be better spent
supporting a community that needs their own Calagator; putting together
a team to support, populate and publicize the site; and work with us to
exchange patches. Using this approach would directly benefit that
community and the patches will reflect their actual needs.

If you want to simply make the install process better, please submit
patches against installation documentation:
http://github.com/calagator/calagator/blob/master/INSTALL.md

If you really want to write an installer, it'd be best to target a
specific deployment platform, such as Heroku.com. If the Solr search
feature can be disabled, it should be possible to run the app on their
free or $15/mo accounts, saving the user from having to learn how to
setup servers or find someone that can. By picking a specific shared
hosting platform like Heroku, Site5, SpeedyRails, etc the installer is
much easier because it'd just plug into existing infrastructure. I
recommend starting with Heroku because their free hosting option may be
good enough to get started.

In contrast, writing a general purpose installer for Calagator, similar
to the one in WordPress, would be extremely difficult -- and I say this
as someone that's been doing server automation for many years. It's easy
to install WordPress because it has few dependencies, which are
configured in few ways, and the app can be deployed on most shared
hosting servers without having to learn to administer UNIX or PHP -- so
the barrier to entry is extremely low. In contrast, it's harder to
install non-PHP web apps like Calagator because they have more
dependencies, which are configured in many different ways, and there's a
high probability that you'll need to understand how to administer UNIX
and your Rails web server -- which isn't a big deal, and you can find a
volunteer or pay someone. However, automating it is a nightmare because
of the different OSes, versions, and variants in how people set them up.
If you're serious about trying to write a general purpose installer, I
recommend you look into how I've automated the setup of
OpenSourceBridge.org, which is mostly a Rails app and WordPress blog:
http://github.com/igal/osbp_automateit

Even if a general purpose installer for Calagator could be built, I
don't think many people would use it. People run Ruby web apps in dozens
of different ways (e.g., root Passenger+Ngnix+REE, user-compiled
Unicorn+MRI, hosted FCGI+Mongrel, etc) and often refuse to use anything
other than their one preferred approach. Another concern is that if
folks don't have the skills needed to setup their server, which really
isn't a big deal, they won't be able to keep it running to keep their
community alive, so I kinda want to encourage them to find someone that
can.s

Anyway, I hope you understand that I'm not trying to discourage you, but
rather am trying to suggest alternatives that would help create more
value from your efforts.

-igal

[camo]

Thanks for the advice!

On Nov 22, 4:14 am, Igal Koshevoy <i...@pragmaticraft.com> wrote:
> camo wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I'm setting up Calagator to test out and was wondering how to go about
> > writing an installer for non-tech people, somewhat like the Wordpress
> > installer or other similar web interface installs. If Calagator is the
> > best solution for the problem, I want to be able to hand it over to
> > other people who can help to maintain it.
>
> Thanks for the interest, you're welcome to try this.
>
> However, I feel the energy needed to do this would be better spent
> supporting a  community that needs their own Calagator; putting together
> a team to support, populate and publicize the site; and work with us to
> exchange patches. Using this approach would directly benefit that
> community and the patches will reflect their actual needs.

There are few tech-savvy anarchists in this area (that I know of).
Because there is a heavy emphasis on DIY, I would like to have
something that honors this spirit and allows for people to be able to
do as much as possible on their own. I am looking into writing a
parser for Facebook events and the MySpace event listing for venues,
which might be applicable for other Calagator instances.

> If the Solr search
> feature can be disabled, it should be possible to run the app on their
> free or $15/mo accounts, saving the user from having to learn how to
> setup servers or find someone that can.

This would be the key to getting it to run on other servers. It is
worth looking into.

In the meantime, I'll be testing it out and configuring it as a demo
to show others.

Cameron

[Luke Closs]

Maybe someone needs to set this up as a hosted service and offer free and/or paid access to it.

I think we all know of many groups that would love access to such a service.  I ran vancal.org on calagator for a while, but ended up taking it down b/c i didn't have enough energy to maintain the operation of it.  Maybe if there was a hosted service we could be content with our current installation process.

Disclaimer: I suggest this without understanding the work required to modify Calagator to be run as a multi-account hosted service.

Cheers,
Luke

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[Reid Beels]

Hi Luke,

I'm fairly interested in the notion of Calagator as a hosted service, and I think this will happen eventually.

If I might ask, what were the specific hassles of operation that you encountered running vancal.org? Even if automating the installation process is a difficult task, we'd like to make the job of running a Calagator instance as painless as we reasonably can. :)

Thanks,
Reid

[Luke Closs]

It basically came down to unfamiliarity with the deployment mechanism.  Not being a rails hacker, it wasn't obvious to me the proper way to deploy changes.  So I had it all up and running, but then deploying changes became tricky and frustrating.  I don't have specifics - and maybe the docs are better now.

The other thing was that I was paying to run a VPS and had to pay extra for more RAM used by Solr.  It struck me as odd that we needed ~200mb of constant ram usage for full text search.  I had to put Solr restarting on cron because it wasn't staying up.

(Since all this happened I've now become much more familiar with Solr - we're deploying it at Socialtext.)

Cheers,
Luke

[Igal Koshevoy]

Luke Closs wrote:
> It basically came down to unfamiliarity with the deployment
> mechanism. Not being a rails hacker, it wasn't obvious to me the
> proper way to deploy changes. So I had it all up and running, but
> then deploying changes became tricky and frustrating.

I wish that you'd asked on this list or contacted another Rails
developer, because deploying changes should haven't been a big deal
compared to setting up the instance.

Asking questions and sending specific feedback on problematic
documentation, UIs and such are often the only way that we know that
there's something we need to improve.

> I was paying to run a VPS and had to pay extra for more RAM used by
> Solr. It struck me as odd that we needed ~200mb of constant ram usage
> for full text search.

The calagator.org site uses about 70MB for two Rails servers and 60MB
for Solr, and costs me about $7 a month to host.

Although this is more expensive than hosting a static calendar, I find
this well worth the price because lots of people I don't know go around
spontaneously adding interesting events all the time for me and others
to go to, as well as frequently adding and cleaning up data without my
intervention.

If the 60MB footprint of Solr is a big deal for others running
Calagators, it may make sense to make the searching configurable. An
admin could tell it to use Solr, Sphinx (a lightweight daemon similar to
Solr, but harder to use), or use database queries (requires no extra
memory, but are slow and less sophisticated than Solr or Sphinx). Reid's
already suggested that the default configuration should be to use
database queries, which would save developers from having to install
Java and start Solr.

> I had to put Solr restarting on cron because it wasn't staying up.

I've never had a Solr server die, ever -- it's steadfast reliability has
been one of the reasons I've stuck with it. The Solr process on
calagator.org has been running non-stop for 7 months. I think your
system was running out of memory and killing the daemon or something
else was wrong.

> Maybe someone needs to set this up as a hosted service and offer free

> and/or paid access to it. [...] Disclaimer: I suggest this without

> understanding the work required to modify Calagator to be run as a
> multi-account hosted service.

It's already possible to run multiple Calagators on a single server. I
and others on this list would gladly host Calagator instances if someone
is interested. I figure $15 a month would be fair to host a typical
instance, plus $50/mo if this includes watching for and cleaning up spam.

-igal