Gotchas in ec2onrails setup

[whatcould]

First off, thanks to paul for putting so much work into this -- this
is my first time with ec2 and it's going remarkably smoothly (compared
to how i feared it would go after reading amazon's instructions!).

I did hit a number of snags... I would do some forking and pushing but
I'm not even sure where to change most of these things, short of
running the build scripts myself.

* the github gem is much more advanced than the rubygems version --
there were a few things that just did not work with the rubygems
version. The instructions should probably include "sudo gem install
pauldowman-ec2onrails" instead of just "sudo gem install ec2onrails".
* The AMI ids on the github readme seem to be behind the ones on the
ec2onrails.rubyforge.org readme -- 0_9_9 vs 0_9_9_1
* That said, even 0_9_9_1 seems to be behind what the github gem's
capistrano tasks need. For instance:
** A large chunk of c2onrails:setup requires changing the app user's
group to "rootequiv" and sudoing. But there is no group "rootequiv",
and the sudoers file is not the same as the github /server/files/etc/
sudoers
** Some of the scripts ec2onrails:setup needs are not in /usr/local/
ec2onrails/bin/.

I guess it's just a question of synching up the new github version to
the AMI setup? Seems like I could git clone the repository and run a
script, but I was unsuccessful in figuring that out.

[Paul Dowman]

If you're using the gem from RubyForge, then you need to use the released version of the AMI. "cap ec2onrails:ami_ids" will tell you the AMI id's.

If you're using the gem from GitHub, then build the AMI from the same GitHub repo.

Paul

[whatcould]

> build the AMI from the same GitHub repo.

Ah yes, then i'd need to figure out how to do that! I see the
instructions now, maybe tomorrow.

When I run "cp ec2onrails:ami_ids" i get the same IDs that are in
version.rb; they don't seem very useful:

32-bit server image (US location) for EC2 on Rails 0.9.10.3: ami-xx
64-bit server image (US location) for EC2 on Rails 0.9.10.3: ami-xx
32-bit server image (EU location) for EC2 on Rails 0.9.10.3: ami-xx
64-bit server image (EU location) for EC2 on Rails 0.9.10.3: ami-xx


The RubyForge gem wasn't getting anywhere -- wouldn't read the db
config. I switched to the GH version, it worked, and eventually I
found the problem (I'd added ":ebs_vol_id => 'vol-6730c60e'" to my :db
role and it didn't like that... was fixed somewhere along the line).

[Paul Dowman]

The github gem (built from the master branch) doesn't have public AMI id's because it's unreleased, you need to build your own AMI if you're using that version.

Paul