Clean configuration of lucee on Centos 7

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Bob Dronski

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Mar 23, 2016, 4:22:32 PM3/23/16
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I've been running railo for many years, and have been gritting my teeth knowing I need to move to Lucee, but had some minor issues with updating my test server and kept putting things off.  So I decided to take a shot at doing a complete clean install to finally begin the migration.  This is a recap of my endeavors.  I'm doing this for two reasons-

1) there doesn't seem to be a "Lucee install for dummies" anywhere, and this is an attempt to get something out in "them there internet thingies"

and 

B) I wanted to point out some of my frustrations as to where holes are that may frustrate n00bs that may give up before finding this info.

I created a new VM in VMWare Fusion running Centos 7, specifically CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.iso

I ran a yum update to make sure things were sufficiently up to date.

Then I ran Jordan's installer from the lucee.org site
lucee-4.5.2.018-pl0-linux-x64-installer.run

It asked for the apache directory.  That's when I realized I didn't have apache installed. A simple yum install httpd took care of that.  I was able to successfully run the complete installer.  Home free?  Not so much.  Tried to call up the server admin page and got a 503 error.  Also tried to bring up a default cfm page.  Nothing.  

After an extended amount of hair pulling, I finally realized I should take a look and see if things worked via port 8888.  Voila!  Able to pull up the default lucee cfm page as well as the server admin page!

At this time I thought I would take advantage of the helpful links on the Welcome to your Lucee Installation page.  I clicked on the "First steps" link and was taken to the bitbucket page telling me I needed to log in.  OK.  Created an account, logged in, went back and got "You do not have access to the wiki."  Now as far as I can tell, I don't think a wiki was ever created.  I'm seeing people branching, but no wiki.  I can totally understand that if this was Lucee 5, but as Lucee 4 is what every CF developer should be using, and has been around for a year now, even a stub page would be an improvement.

But I still could not serve up pages via port 80.  After another extensive google hunt I 
managed to FINALLY find a reference to this in a thread.

Turns out that Centos 7 minimal install automatically activates SELinux. Surprise! Fortunately,

/usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect=1

will allow me to finally serve cfm files via port 80.

Next up, vhosts.  Tried to take one of my vhost files from another server and plop it in.  Every attempt of doing an apachectl restart gave me

Job for httpd.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status httpd.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

Tried both commands, neither gave me any details.  Back to google.  Turns out that apache2 has made some very subtle changes.  The most important of which is that filenames now need to be encased in quotes, e.g.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName site1.obysw.dev
    DocumentRoot "/home/site1/public_html"
</VirtualHost>

and not as my old file had it:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName site1.obysw.dev
    DocumentRoot /home/site1/public_html
</VirtualHost>


I'm pleased to say that catalina worked like a charm, taking care of setting up the tomcat web contexts for me.
 
I'm sure there are many other things I should be including here, but at least this is a step by step method of creating a (fully) working BASIC lucee server.

So what should I do with this?  hope that this post will be sufficient to find?  Create a blog entry somewhere?  Make a modified version of this the long-lost wiki entry?  ;-)

Hoping this helps someone,

bob

 

Robert Munn

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Mar 25, 2016, 2:06:50 PM3/25/16
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For reference, I wrote a blog post awhile ago about installing Lucee on Tomcat 7 on OS X. I don’t use the installer, I use the WAR file:


I also don’t connect it to a web server, and I’m not doing a clean OS install in the blog.

What is nice about my method is how reproducible it is. I have now deployed it on several Linux servers, and it involves a few simple steps:

- clean OS install ( I have used CentOS, Ubuntu, even Lubuntu )
- create home directories for web sites on new server. 
- install and configure nginx for my hosts, which I have templated on my local machiine
- zip tomcat folder (minus logs) and copy to new server, unzip in /opt
- configure tomcat for hosts, RAM, SSL

I follow this process and it works exactly the same way every time I use it. 

NOTE: There is one specific problem with my install process. When I create new virtual hosts in Tomcat and start it, Tomcat copies ./WEB-INF to my new host root folders. It does not, however, copy ./WEB-INF/lib or ./WEB-INF/web.xml. That is consistent behavior so I know to copy those things manually. If I could fix this little bug it would be perfect.

The process works reliably enough that I would script the whole thing if I did it more often. I deployed four MuraCMS sites this way, complete with site layouts and databases, in a couple of hours, and it only took that long because I didn’t copy the WEB-INF folders from my local system, I let Lucee re-create them (which of course means re-creating logins, datasources, etc. by hand.) Most of the time was spent in two ways:

1. copying files
2. configuring tomcat, nginx, lucee by hand for each site.

I will make a post about this on my blog.


Robert

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Bob Dronski

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Mar 25, 2016, 2:31:04 PM3/25/16
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Robert,

Even though I am a devout mac user, I did not pay attention to your article as I wanted to have my test servers on the same platform as my production VPS.  Now I’m sorry I didn’t.  I will attempt your installation method to see what I can learn.

I really posted the original message because I spent the better part of 2 days getting a usable test server going, and hoped that I might possibly give a hint to others that might be in the same situation.  And yes, much to the chagrin of some members of this group, there are lots of people who do not know all the possible ins and outs of configuration and need help.

Before I succeeded in my attempt I also tried to use the foundeo script for ngnix https://github.com/foundeo/ubuntu-nginx-lucee as well as trying to use Jordan’s installer on Ubuntu.  Both left me with issues.

I am truly grateful for the entire Lucee team and had hoped that my post might have somehow helped the greater good.  Even with reminding them that the wiki link goes to nowhere.  So easy to forget when you’re deep in the bowels of development.

I don’t know whether Michael Heels’ post on setting up an environment https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lucee/sNC-chsjf-4/lZfpT-erCQAJ was pure coincidence or not, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that is definitely  needed, and am very glad it’s being added to the documentation.

bob


Michael H.

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Mar 25, 2016, 3:40:49 PM3/25/16
to Lucee
Hi Bob,

coincidence doesn’t exist. Actually I posted it cause of your post about the centos install. I wanted to do it long ago but never found the time. Your post reminded me.

@Robert: You could use a base Vm image and customize it with vagrant for an automatic server-install. At my company we use it and like that a new developer can join a project with his own dev-server within a walk to the coffee-machine.

If you want I can look up some scripts.
Cheers
Michael

Jordan Michaels

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Mar 25, 2016, 4:26:26 PM3/25/16
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Hi Bob,

Since the whole point of the installers is to help make the installation process simple, I created a couple of issues regarding the installer based on your post:

https://github.com/utdream/lucee-installer/issues/78
https://github.com/utdream/lucee-installer/issues/79

Would you be willing to elaborate on what issues you experienced on Ubuntu? I do test new installer builds on Ubuntu and I'm not aware of issues there. If there are some, I'd like to know so that those issues can be addressed as well.

Thanks for helping make the installers better!

--
Kind regards,
Jordan Michaels
Vivio Technologies

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Dronski" <dro...@gmail.com>
To: lu...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, March 25, 2016 11:30:55 AM
Subject: Re: [Lucee] Clean configuration of lucee on Centos 7

Robert,

Even though I am a devout mac user, I did not pay attention to your article as I wanted to have my test servers on the same platform as my production VPS. Now I’m sorry I didn’t. I will attempt your installation method to see what I can learn.

I really posted the original message because I spent the better part of 2 days getting a usable test server going, and hoped that I might possibly give a hint to others that might be in the same situation. And yes, much to the chagrin of some members of this group, there are lots of people who do not know all the possible ins and outs of configuration and need help.

Before I succeeded in my attempt I also tried to use the foundeo script for ngnix https://github.com/foundeo/ubuntu-nginx-lucee <https://github.com/foundeo/ubuntu-nginx-lucee> as well as trying to use Jordan’s installer on Ubuntu. Both left me with issues.

I am truly grateful for the entire Lucee team and had hoped that my post might have somehow helped the greater good. Even with reminding them that the wiki link goes to nowhere. So easy to forget when you’re deep in the bowels of development.

I don’t know whether Michael Heels’ post on setting up an environment https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lucee/sNC-chsjf-4/lZfpT-erCQAJ <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lucee/sNC-chsjf-4/lZfpT-erCQAJ> was pure coincidence or not, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that is definitely needed, and am very glad it’s being added to the documentation.

bob


> On Mar 25, 2016, at 1:06 PM, Robert Munn <robert...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For reference, I wrote a blog post awhile ago about installing Lucee on Tomcat 7 on OS X. I don’t use the installer, I use the WAR file:
>
> http://www.bonnydoonmedia.com/index.cfm/blog/installing-lucee-on-tomcat-7-os-x/ <http://www.bonnydoonmedia.com/index.cfm/blog/installing-lucee-on-tomcat-7-os-x/>
>
> I also don’t connect it to a web server, and I’m not doing a clean OS install in the blog.
>
> What is nice about my method is how reproducible it is. I have now deployed it on several Linux servers, and it involves a few simple steps:
>
> - clean OS install ( I have used CentOS, Ubuntu, even Lubuntu )
> - create home directories for web sites on new server.
> - install and configure nginx for my hosts, which I have templated on my local machiine
> - zip tomcat folder (minus logs) and copy to new server, unzip in /opt
> - configure tomcat for hosts, RAM, SSL
>
> I follow this process and it works exactly the same way every time I use it.
>
> NOTE: There is one specific problem with my install process. When I create new virtual hosts in Tomcat and start it, Tomcat copies ./WEB-INF to my new host root folders. It does not, however, copy ./WEB-INF/lib or ./WEB-INF/web.xml. That is consistent behavior so I know to copy those things manually. If I could fix this little bug it would be perfect.
>
> The process works reliably enough that I would script the whole thing if I did it more often. I deployed four MuraCMS sites this way, complete with site layouts and databases, in a couple of hours, and it only took that long because I didn’t copy the WEB-INF folders from my local system, I let Lucee re-create them (which of course means re-creating logins, datasources, etc. by hand.) Most of the time was spent in two ways:
>
> 1. copying files
> 2. configuring tomcat, nginx, lucee by hand for each site.
>
> I will make a post about this on my blog.
>
>
> Robert
>
>> On Mar 23, 2016, at 1:22 PM, Bob Dronski <dro...@gmail.com <mailto:dro...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I've been running railo for many years, and have been gritting my teeth knowing I need to move to Lucee, but had some minor issues with updating my test server and kept putting things off. So I decided to take a shot at doing a complete clean install to finally begin the migration. This is a recap of my endeavors. I'm doing this for two reasons-
>>
>> 1) there doesn't seem to be a "Lucee install for dummies" anywhere, and this is an attempt to get something out in "them there internet thingies"
>>
>> and
>>
>> B) I wanted to point out some of my frustrations as to where holes are that may frustrate n00bs that may give up before finding this info.
>>
>> I created a new VM in VMWare Fusion running Centos 7, specifically CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.iso
>>
>> I ran a yum update to make sure things were sufficiently up to date.
>>
>> Then I ran Jordan's installer from the lucee.org <http://lucee.org/> site
>> lucee-4.5.2.018-pl0-linux-x64-installer.run
>>
>> It asked for the apache directory. That's when I realized I didn't have apache installed. A simple yum install httpd took care of that. I was able to successfully run the complete installer. Home free? Not so much. Tried to call up the server admin page and got a 503 error. Also tried to bring up a default cfm page. Nothing.
>>
>> After an extended amount of hair pulling, I finally realized I should take a look and see if things worked via port 8888. Voila! Able to pull up the default lucee cfm page as well as the server admin page!
>>
>> At this time I thought I would take advantage of the helpful links on the Welcome to your Lucee Installation page. I clicked on the "First steps" link and was taken to the bitbucket page telling me I needed to log in. OK. Created an account, logged in, went back and got "You do not have access to the wiki." Now as far as I can tell, I don't think a wiki was ever created. I'm seeing people branching, but no wiki. I can totally understand that if this was Lucee 5, but as Lucee 4 is what every CF developer should be using, and has been around for a year now, even a stub page would be an improvement.
>>
>> But I still could not serve up pages via port 80. After another extensive google hunt I
>> managed to FINALLY find a reference to this in a thread.
>> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/lucee/q-IFa56C5yQ/discussion <https://groups.google.com/d/topic/lucee/q-IFa56C5yQ/discussion>
>>
>> Turns out that Centos 7 minimal install automatically activates SELinux. Surprise! Fortunately,
>>
>> /usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect=1
>>
>> will allow me to finally serve cfm files via port 80.
>>
>> Next up, vhosts. Tried to take one of my vhost files from another server and plop it in. Every attempt of doing an apachectl restart gave me
>>
>> Job for httpd.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status httpd.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
>>
>> Tried both commands, neither gave me any details. Back to google. Turns out that apache2 has made some very subtle changes. The most important of which is that filenames now need to be encased in quotes, e.g.
>>
>> <VirtualHost *:80>
>> ServerName site1.obysw.dev
>> DocumentRoot "/home/site1/public_html"
>> </VirtualHost>
>>
>> and not as my old file had it:
>>
>> <VirtualHost *:80>
>> ServerName site1.obysw.dev
>> DocumentRoot /home/site1/public_html
>> </VirtualHost>
>>
>>
>> I'm pleased to say that catalina worked like a charm, taking care of setting up the tomcat web contexts for me.
>>
>> I'm sure there are many other things I should be including here, but at least this is a step by step method of creating a (fully) working BASIC lucee server.
>>
>> So what should I do with this? hope that this post will be sufficient to find? Create a blog entry somewhere? Make a modified version of this the long-lost wiki entry? ;-)
>>
>> Hoping this helps someone,
>>
>> bob
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Love Lucee? Become a supporter and be part of the Lucee project today! - http://lucee.org/supporters/become-a-supporter.html <http://lucee.org/supporters/become-a-supporter.html>
>> ---
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lucee" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lucee+un...@googlegroups.com <mailto:lucee+un...@googlegroups.com>.
>> To post to this group, send email to lu...@googlegroups.com <mailto:lu...@googlegroups.com>.
>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lucee/4793e27b-630b-4257-83ea-ad73521c86cf%40googlegroups.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lucee/4793e27b-630b-4257-83ea-ad73521c86cf%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>.
>
>
> --
> Love Lucee? Become a supporter and be part of the Lucee project today! - http://lucee.org/supporters/become-a-supporter.html <http://lucee.org/supporters/become-a-supporter.html>
> ---
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> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lucee+un...@googlegroups.com <mailto:lucee+un...@googlegroups.com>.
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> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lucee/05D4A48B-4928-41E7-9047-E1BBB056E016%40gmail.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lucee/05D4A48B-4928-41E7-9047-E1BBB056E016%40gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>.

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Bob Dronski

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Mar 25, 2016, 7:47:24 PM3/25/16
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Jordan,

On the bad install, I was getting the Apache2 Ubuntu Default Page, but attempting to pull up the Lucee server page gave me a 503 error.

I went back and tried to do another install.  Of course this time it all worked. This was what I did:
ubuntu-14.04.4-server-amd64.iso
only install ssh  in tools
apt-get install apache2
ran lucee installer.



So I tried to go through the /var/log/installer logs to see if I could find what my install options were, but I couldn’t find the details.  But I THINK that I installed LAMP and Tomcat the first time.  Tomcat I am sure of, because I get a success page on port 8080 on the bad machine, and found libapache2-mod-php5 there as well.

I did another install with only ssh and tomcat.  I got a conflict with the tomcat shutdown port.  It’s possible that I put in another random port.  So my GUESS is that it was the default Ubuntu install of Tomcat7 that caused the failure.  

At the very least, some sort of Lucee install for Dummies would make sense.  It should tell me that I should not install anything (but ssh if desired) through the Ubuntu/Centos installers.

Please let me know what else I can do to help.

bob

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