Vagrant for VMware Fusion with plugin issues… Part 2

After the previous blog entry I wrote up, working through getting vagrant to spool up a vmware image I got a few other suggestions via Twitter.

With that quick delete of the hidden vagrant directory I gave it a shot again with the provider flagh.

rm -rf .vagrant/
$ vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusionBringing machine 'default' up with 'vmware_fusion' provider...
[default] VMware requires root privileges to make many of the changes
necessary for Vagrant to control it. In a moment, Vagrant will ask for
your administrator password in order to install a helper that will have
permissions to make these changes. Note that Vagrant itself continues
to run without administrative privileges.
Password:
[default] Box 'bosh-solo-0.6.4' was not found. Fetching box from specified URL for
the provider 'vmware_fusion'. Note that if the URL does not have
a box for this provider, you should interrupt Vagrant now and add
the box yourself. Otherwise Vagrant will attempt to download the
full box prior to discovering this error.
Downloading or copying the box...

Which this seemed to work. Downloading the helpers and such started and I waited patiently.

A Few Thoughts…

Needing to delete a hidden file struck me as one of those completely arbitrary and random solutions. It worked, which is awesome, but it working is a completely counter intuitive solution. I did a ‘destroy’ previously along with a number of things that were somewhat not intuitive. At this point the steps were fine, I had to ask for help, and I got help really fast. That’s awesome, but needing to go through those steps was unfortunate and ties back around to @jeffsussna‘s tweet earlier.

Anyway, as soon as I did this I decided Virtual Box it is. As it went through a 40 minute download of an image (??) it finished and displayed…

$ vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusionBringing machine 'default' up with 'vmware_fusion' provider...
[default] VMware requires root privileges to make many of the changes
necessary for Vagrant to control it. In a moment, Vagrant will ask for
your administrator password in order to install a helper that will have
permissions to make these changes. Note that Vagrant itself continues
to run without administrative privileges.
Password:
[default] Box 'bosh-solo-0.6.4' was not found. Fetching box from specified URL for
the provider 'vmware_fusion'. Note that if the URL does not have
a box for this provider, you should interrupt Vagrant now and add
the box yourself. Otherwise Vagrant will attempt to download the
full box prior to discovering this error.
Downloading or copying the box...
Extracting box...te: 119k/s, Estimated time remaining: --:--:--)
The box you attempted to add doesn't match the provider you specified.

Provider expected: vmware_fusion
Provider of box: virtualbox

… because the image isn’t available for vmware according to Vagrant, so for now, with some solutions and more questions I’m just going to go with the Virtual Box Solution and get back on track with the larger picture blog entry I’m writing. Thanks to @brianmmclain, @mitchelh, @jeffsussna and @thoward37.

Vagrant for VMware Fusion with plugin issues…

I’ve started using Vagrant pretty regularly. I downloaded Virtual Box and been tinkering away with some of the vagrant packages. The one huge bummer was that I was under the delusion that it only worked with Vagrant. Then, I was told by a fellow coder that I needed to check out the VMware Fusion plugin. I immediately was stoked! Simply, have you…

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vmware-fusion
Installing the 'vagrant-vmware-fusion' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-vmware-fusion (0.6.1)'!
$ vagrant plugin license vagrant-vmware-fusion license.lic
Installing license for 'vagrant-vmware-fusion'...
The license for 'vagrant-vmware-fusion' was successfully installed!
$

Now mind you, you’ll need to go out and buy the VMware Fusion Plugin from Hashi Corp. From my perspective I was happy with this purchase just to get the stability improvements of VMware Fusion.

Vagrant & Riak

For my first example of the new plugin I forked and then cloned the Bosh Riak Repository. Once that was cloned I simply opened a terminal and navigated to the path of the repository and tried…

vagrant up

…and immediately got the message, “Failed to load the “vagrant-vmware-fusion” plugin. View logs for more details.” Noooooooooooooooez! 🙁 I was sad. But dove into the logs by executing vagrant up with…

VAGRANT_LOG=INFO vagrant up

…and there was the error amid the log was something about the VMware Plugin requiring Vagrant the latest version.

Doh! I’d forgotten to upgrade first. I installed the upgrade via the downloads for 1.2.2. Once I upgrade I ran into the same error. A quick ‘vagrant -v’ to check the version showed 1.2.2 was installed. Not knowing the special secret sauce at this point, I figured I’d just reboot. It had been about 20-30 days since I had, so who knew what weird service or something needed to be restarted. I guessed correctly and after a restart vagrant kicked off the download of the vagrant image for the Bosh Riak deploy. It went by fast, and since it didn’t spit out an error about not loading the plugin I thought everything had worked…

$ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
[default] Setting the name of the VM...
[default] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports...
[default] Creating shared folders metadata...
[default] Clearing any previously set network interfaces...
[default] Preparing network interfaces based on configuration...
[default] Forwarding ports...
[default] --- 22 => 2222 (adapter 1)
[default] Booting VM...
[default] Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.

...more stuff here...

…or so I had thought. Scrolling back up through the log I realized Vagrant had NOT used the plugin for VMware Fusion. I was still stuck with VirtualBox. I went through the plugin install again to see if it just needed re-applied. At this point, since I’d already installed Virtual Box previously I figured maybe I’d just keep plunging forward and mess with the vmware plugin later, however I’d REALLY like to have all my virtualized images running via Fusion. Not sure what I missed I decided to give it one more try…

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vmware-fusion
Installing the 'vagrant-vmware-fusion' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-vmware-fusion (0.6.1)'!
Adrons-MacBook-Air-3:Downloads adronhall$ vagrant plugin license vagrant-vmware-fusion license.lic
Installing license for 'vagrant-vmware-fusion'...
The license for 'vagrant-vmware-fusion' was successfully installed!
$ cd ~/Codez/riak-release/
$ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...

Ugh… so I almost give up at this point. I read this, it seems ironic.

Being this isn’t the best user experience I stumble forward trying something else. I get a suggestion from a fellow coder (thx Brian) to try this.

$ vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusionAn active machine was found with a different provider. Vagrant
currently allows each machine to be brought up with only a single
provider at a time. A future version will remove this limitation.
Until then, please destroy the existing machine to up with a new
provider.

Machine name: default
Active provider: virtualbox
Requested provider: vmware_fusion
$

Well, that didn’t work either. It looks like maybe if I just blew away my VirtualBox images it would work? Well, funny, being I don’t have any VirtualBox images running or installed. Well, just to make sure I checked the VirtualBox directory. Nothing. I went ahead and deleted the entire VirtualBox Application. Tried again.

$ vagrant up --provider=vmware_fusionAn active machine was found with a different provider. Vagrant
currently allows each machine to be brought up with only a single
provider at a time. A future version will remove this limitation.
Until then, please destroy the existing machine to up with a new
provider.

Machine name: default
Active provider: virtualbox
Requested provider: vmware_fusion
$

Ok, I’ve no idea now. Any help would be greatly appreciated! This same thing appears to work fine under VirtualBox, but with the plugin added and VirtualBox removed I’m still not able to get this to work. Help!

Bringing to Life an Open Source Software Project via Github & Jekyll – Part 1

Starting with Github, Automatic Page Generation & Jekyll

It’s time for another blog series! This is a series I’m starting to outline that crazy complex site I’m building to prove out all sorts of things, all located at http://adron.me. So far it’s just a site that hold portfolio information for my coding, biking and related information about me. However I’m using this as a base template, that anybody can use via the github repo I’ve created simply titled Me, to start and scale their own personal site. But beyond that, I’ll be using practices and technology that can be used to truly scale large sites with lots of users. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about this series please ping me on Twitter @adron or leave a comment on this blog itself.

First things first, let’s get our git repository setup on github with the appropriate issues list, and project page via gh-pages (jekyll).

Create a new github project.

Creating a new github project, setting it up with a default Node.js readme file and .gitignore.

Creating a new github project, setting it up with a default Node.js readme file and .gitignore. (Click for full size image)

Next we’ll have the site created and github will display the repository page. On this page you can see that the README.md and .gitignore file have been created with some basic defaults for a Node.js Project. At the top right click on the Settings button to navigate to the settings page.

Settings, get there.

Settings, get there. (Click on image for full size)

On the settings page scroll down until you see the section for Github Pages with the Automatic Page Generator button. Click that button.

Github Pages Automatic Page Generator.

Github Pages Automatic Page Generator. (Click for full size image)

You’ll be directed to create a page, with default data as shown below.

Default Github Pages Project Page

Default Github Pages Project Page. (Click for full size image)

Scroll down on this page and click to create the automatically generated page. You’ll be sent to the page to select a theme. I just went with the default since I’ll delete it later to create the Jeckyll project page instead. Click on publish on this screen.

Default Template Selection for Github Pages.

Default Template Selection for Github Pages. (Click for full size image)

Once this page generates you’ll be directed back to the github repository again. At the top of the page there will be a link to the newly generated page. You can click on this to navigate to it and see what it looks like. Also note that the new repository branch which is named gh-pages is not displayed. This new branch includes all of the files for this Github Pages project page.

Github Pages Automatic Page Generator generated a branch for the new page.

Github Pages Automatic Page Generator generated a branch for the new page. (Click for a full size image)

Change the branch to the gh-pages branch and you’ll see that the branch has entirely different files than the master branch.

The default files created in an automatically generated Github Pages site.

The default files created in an automatically generated Github Pages site. (Click for full size image)

If you click on the link at the top of the page, you’ll see where the current automatically generated page is and where the future jekyll site we’ll build will be located at. This page that was generated (unless you chose another theme) will look like this.

Github Pages default page with a default theme.

Github Pages default page with a default theme. (Click for full size image)

Now we have an appropriate branch and we’re ready to toss a jeckyll project in its place. However, if a default template and related content works for your project, that’s a great way to go with it. However some projects may want a blog or other content, just a bit more the default generated page, and this is what we’ll create with this jeckyll site. It’s also very easy to create a jeckyll site and create an image portfolio or a host of other types of sites, all backed by a git repository on github. I’ll keep moving now, on to the jeckyll site!

A Github Jeckyll Site

First get a clone of the site that was generated in the above instructions.

git clone git@github.com:Adron/Me.git

Now we have a good working directory where this is cloned at. First switch branches to the gh-pages branch. Get a list of all branches (the -a switch shows all branches, even the remote branches).

git branch -a

The results will display with the full branch names for the remote branches.

git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/gh-pages
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/theme-all-by-itself

The asterisks shows the current active branch. The branch that needs edited is the remotes/origin/gh-pages branch. Check it out with the following command.

git checkout remotes/origin/gh-pages

Which will then print out the following content.

Note: checking out 'remotes/origin/gh-pages'.

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental
changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this
state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.

If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:

  git checkout -b new_branch_name

HEAD is now at d430b0c... ... etc. etc...

What this basically means is, we have a branch that is disconnected and not attached to the repository in any way. To fix this we’ll create a working local branch to work with the remotes/origin/gh-pages branch. Do this with the following command.

git branch gh-pages

Then if you get a list of the existing local branches the master and gh-pages branches will be available locally.

git branch
* (no branch)
  gh-pages
  master

Now switch to that branch. Since we’re currently on (No branch) this content will be switched to the local gh-pages branch wit the following command.

git checkout gh-pages

Now delete all those files in that directory that github automatically created. In their place add a README.md and .gitignore file. In the commands below I’m using Sublime Text 2 command line tooling to open up the files into memory with Sublime Text 2.

subl .gitignore

Add the following content to the .gitignore file.

_site/
*.DS_Store
.DS_Store

Save that file. Create the README.md and…

subl README.md

…add some content to it.

My Awesome Header
===
Description: An appropriate description.
Documentation
---
Dammit, WRITE YOUR DOCUMENTATION!!!!

I added a little mark down for that README.md example just so there is something more than just text displaying.

Add these files to the local repository, committing and then pushing them up to the remote gh-pages repository.

git add -A
git commit -m 'Adding initial .gitignore and README.md content.'
git push origin gh-pages

Now in this directory we’re about to get things kicking for Jeckyll. First, get Jeckyll.

sudo gem install jeckyll

For your specific OS you may want to check out the actual jeckyll repository installation instructions. There is more of a break down of various operating system needs for use.

Once it is installed, we’re now ready to use jeckyll to generate static content and even run the jeckyll server to view what our site looks like locally. Now let’s get some content together that jeckyll will know how to statically generate for viewing.

Create a folder called “_layouts” in the local repository. With the “_” at the beginning of the directory, it will not be generated into the static content by jekyll, but the convention is for the _layouts directory to include the templates for creating a standard layout for the rest of the pages in the site.

mkdir _layouts

After creating the new folder, create a default.html inside the folder.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <meta charset=utf-8 />
  <title> {% if page.title %} {{ page.title }} | {% endif %} Adron Hall</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/styles.css" />
</head>
<body>

  <div id="main">

    <header>
      <h1> Adron's Github Project Pages </h1>
    <header>

    <nav role="navigation">
      <ul>
        <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
        <li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
        <li><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
      </ul>
    </nav>

    {{ content }}

    <footer>
      <p>&copy; Adron's Github Project Pages 2013 | All Rights Reserved. </p>
    </footer>

  </div>
</body>
</html>

In the above HTML the {{ page.title }} item is a template variable that will display the title of the page when it is generated into static content by jekyll. Once this is created add an index.html page to the root path of the repository.

subl index.html

Now add the following content to the index.html page and save it.

---
layout: default
---
<section role="banner">
  The banner will go here eventually.
</section>

<section class="content">
  <p>
  Welcome to Adron Hall's Github Project Pages all manually created with jekyll!! Please, check out the blog at <a href="http://compositecode.com">Composite Code</a>!
  </p>
</section>

Now create a stylesheet and respective static directory for it.

mkdir css

Create a styles.css file and add the following content that Dave Gamache created. I’ve included it below with all the appropriate licensing information and related content. Save this file when done.

/*
* Skeleton V1.1
* Copyright 2011, Dave Gamache
* http://www.getskeleton.com
* Free to use under the MIT license.
* http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
* 8/17/2011
*/

/* Table of Content
==================================================
	#Reset & Basics
	#Basic Styles
	#Site Styles
	#Typography
	#Links
	#Lists
	#Images
	#Buttons
	#Tabs
	#Forms
	#Misc */

/* #Reset & Basics (Inspired by E. Meyers)
================================================== */
	html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td, article, aside, canvas, details, embed, figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary, time, mark, audio, video {
    border: 0 none;
    font: inherit;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    vertical-align: baseline;
}
article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section {
    display: block;
}
body {
    line-height: 18px;
}
	ol, ul {
		list-style: none; }
	blockquote, q {
		quotes: none; }
	blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
	q:before, q:after {
		content: ";
		content: none; }
	table {
		border-collapse: collapse;
		border-spacing: 0; }

/* #Basic Styles
================================================== */
	body {
		background: url(../images/body_bg.png) repeat;
		font-family: 'Dosis', sans-serif;
		font-size:14px;
		font-weight:500;
		color:#E8E8E8;
		text-shadow:0 1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
		-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; /* Fix for webkit rendering */
		-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;
 }

.max-image 								{ width:100%; height:auto; }
/* #Typography
================================================== */
	h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {font-weight: normal;}
	h1 a, h2 a, h3 a, h4 a, h5 a, h6 a { font-weight: inherit; }
	h1 { font-size: 26px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 14px; color:#FFCC00;}
	h2 { font-size: 20px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 10px; color:#FFF; font-weight:600; }
	h3 { font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 10px; color:#FFF; }
	h4 { font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 4px; color:#bc4444; }
	h5 { font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; }
	h6 { font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; }
	.subheader { color: #777; }

	p { margin: 0 0 20px 0; }
	p img { margin: 0; }
	p.lead { font-size: 21px; line-height: 27px; color: #777;  }

	em { font-style: italic; }
	strong { font-weight: bold; color: #333; }
	small { font-size: 80%; }

/*	Blockquotes  */
	blockquote, blockquote p { font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; color: #333; }
	blockquote { margin: 0; padding: 0 20px 0 20px; border-left: 2px solid #F87536; }
	blockquote cite { display: block; color: #ff8a00; }
	blockquote cite:before { content: "\2014 \0020"; }
	blockquote cite a, blockquote cite a:visited, blockquote cite a:visited { color: #555; }

	hr { border: solid #ddd; border-width: 1px 0 0; clear: both; margin: 10px 0 30px; height: 0; }

/* #Links
================================================== */
	a, a:visited { color: #f35f2a; text-decoration: none; outline: 0; }
	a:hover, a:focus { color: #FFF; }
	p a, p a:visited { line-height: inherit; }

/* #Lists
================================================== */
	ul, ol { margin-bottom: 20px; }
	ul { list-style: none outside; }
	ol { list-style: decimal; }
	ol, ul.square, ul.circle, ul.disc { margin-left: 30px; }
	ul.square { list-style: square outside; }
	ul.circle { list-style: circle outside; }
	ul.disc { list-style: disc outside; }
	ul ul, ul ol,
	ol ol, ol ul { margin: 4px 0 5px 30px; font-size: 90%;  }
	ul ul li, ul ol li,
	ol ol li, ol ul li { margin-bottom: 6px; }
	li { line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 12px; }
	ul.large li { line-height: 21px; }
	li p { line-height: 21px; }

/* #Images
================================================== */

	img.scale-with-grid {
		max-width: 100%;
		height: auto; }

/* #Buttons
================================================== */

	/*.button,
	button,
	input[type="submit"],
	input[type="reset"],
	input[type="button"] {
		background: #3973a6;  Old browsers
		background: #3973a6 -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.2) 0%, rgba(0,0,0,.2) 100%);  FF3.6+
		background: #3973a6 -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,rgba(255,255,255,.2)), color-stop(100%,rgba(0,0,0,.2)));  Chrome,Safari4+
		background: #3973a6 -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.2) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,.2) 100%);  Chrome10+,Safari5.1+
		background: #3973a6 -o-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.2) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,.2) 100%);  Opera11.10+
		background: #3973a6 -ms-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.2) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,.2) 100%);  IE10+
		background: #3973a6 linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.2) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,.2) 100%);  W3C
	  border: 1px solid #3973a6;
	  border-top: 1px solid #3973a6;
	  border-left: 1px solid #3973a6;
	  color: #FFF;
	  display: inline-block;
	  font-size: 12px;
	  font-weight: bold;
	  text-decoration: none;
	  text-shadow: 0 1px rgba(33, 77, 121, .75);
	  cursor: pointer;
	  margin-bottom: 20px;
	  line-height: normal;
	  padding: 8px 10px; }

	.button:hover,
	button:hover,
	input[type="submit"]:hover,
	input[type="reset"]:hover,
	input[type="button"]:hover {
		color: #222;
		background: #FF8A00;  Old browsers
		background: #FF8A00 -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.3) 0%, rgba(0,0,0,.3) 100%);  FF3.6+
		background: #FF8A00 -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,rgba(255,255,255,.3)), color-stop(100%,rgba(0,0,0,.3)));  Chrome,Safari4+
		background: #FF8A00 -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.3) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,.3) 100%);  Chrome10+,Safari5.1+
		background: #FF8A00 -o-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.3) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,.3) 100%);  Opera11.10+
		background: #FF8A00 -ms-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.3) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,.3) 100%);  IE10+
		background: #FF8A00 linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.3) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,.3) 100%);  W3C
	  border: 1px solid #888;
	  border-top: 1px solid #aaa;
	  border-left: 1px solid #aaa; }

	.button:active,
	button:active,
	input[type="submit"]:active,
	input[type="reset"]:active,
	input[type="button"]:active {
		border: 1px solid #666;
		background: #ccc;  Old browsers
		background: #ccc -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.35) 0%, rgba(10,10,10,.4) 100%);  FF3.6+
		background: #ccc -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,rgba(255,255,255,.35)), color-stop(100%,rgba(10,10,10,.4)));  Chrome,Safari4+
		background: #ccc -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.35) 0%,rgba(10,10,10,.4) 100%);  Chrome10+,Safari5.1+
		background: #ccc -o-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.35) 0%,rgba(10,10,10,.4) 100%);  Opera11.10+
		background: #ccc -ms-linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.35) 0%,rgba(10,10,10,.4) 100%);  IE10+
		background: #ccc linear-gradient(top, rgba(255,255,255,.35) 0%,rgba(10,10,10,.4) 100%);  W3C  }

	.button.full-width,
	button.full-width,
	input[type="submit"].full-width,
	input[type="reset"].full-width,
	input[type="button"].full-width {
		width: 100%;
		padding-left: 0 !important;
		padding-right: 0 !important;
		text-align: center; }

	 Fix for odd Mozilla border & padding issues
	button::-moz-focus-inner,
	input::-moz-focus-inner {
    border: 0;
    padding: 0;
	}*/

/* #Tabs (activate in tabs.js)
================================================== */
	/*ul.tabs {
		display: block;
		margin: 0 0 20px 0;
		padding: 0;
		border-bottom: solid 1px #ddd; }
	ul.tabs li {
		display: block;
		width: auto;
		height: 30px;
		padding: 0;
		float: left;
		margin-bottom: 0; }
	ul.tabs li a {
		display: block;
		text-decoration: none;
		width: auto;
		height: 29px;
		padding: 0px 20px;
		line-height: 30px;
		border: solid 1px #ddd;
		border-width: 1px 1px 0 0;
		margin: 0;
		background: #f5f5f5;
		font-size: 13px; }
	ul.tabs li a.active {
		background: #fff;
		height: 30px;
		position: relative;
		top: -4px;
		padding-top: 4px;
		border-left-width: 1px;
		margin: 0 0 0 -1px;
		color: #111;
		-moz-border-radius-topleft: 2px;
		-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 2px;
		border-top-left-radius: 2px;
		-moz-border-radius-topright: 2px;
		-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 2px;
		border-top-right-radius: 2px; }
	ul.tabs li:first-child a.active {
		margin-left: 0; }
	ul.tabs li:first-child a {
		border-width: 1px 1px 0 1px;
		-moz-border-radius-topleft: 2px;
		-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 2px;
		border-top-left-radius: 2px; }
	ul.tabs li:last-child a {
		-moz-border-radius-topright: 2px;
		-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 2px;
		border-top-right-radius: 2px; }

	ul.tabs-content { margin: 0; display: block; }
	ul.tabs-content > li { display:none; }
	ul.tabs-content > li.active { display: block; }

	/* Clearfixing tabs for beautiful stacking */
	/*ul.tabs:before,
	ul.tabs:after {
	  content: '\0020';
	  display: block;
	  overflow: hidden;
	  visibility: hidden;
	  width: 0;
	  height: 0; }
	ul.tabs:after {
	  clear: both; }
	ul.tabs {
	  zoom: 1; }*/*/

/* #Forms
================================================== */

	form {
		margin-bottom: 20px; }
	fieldset {
		margin-bottom: 20px; }
	input[type="text"],
	input[type="password"],
	input[type="email"],
	textarea,
	select {
		border: 1px solid #ccc;
		padding: 6px 4px;
		outline: none;
		-moz-border-radius: 2px;
		-webkit-border-radius: 2px;
		border-radius: 2px;
		font: 13px "HelveticaNeue", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
		color: #777;
		margin: 0;
		width: 210px;
		max-width: 100%;
		display: block;
		margin-bottom: 20px;
		background: #fff; }
	select {
		padding: 0; }
	input[type="text"]:focus,
	input[type="password"]:focus,
	input[type="email"]:focus,
	textarea:focus {
		border: 1px solid #aaa;
 		color: #ffcc00;
 		-moz-box-shadow: 0 0 3px rgba(0,0,0,.2);
		-webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 3px rgba(0,0,0,.2);
		box-shadow:  0 0 3px rgba(0,0,0,.2); }
	textarea {
		min-height: 60px; }
	label,
	legend {
		display: block;
		font-weight: bold;
		font-size: 13px;  }
	select {
		width: 220px; }
	input[type="checkbox"] {
		display: inline; }
	label span,
	legend span {
		font-weight: normal;
		font-size: 13px;
		color: #444; }

/* #Misc
================================================== */
	.remove-bottom { margin-bottom: 0 !important; }
	.half-bottom { margin-bottom: 10px !important; }
	.add-bottom { margin-bottom: 20px !important; }

Now we can use the jekyll command to generate the static content and review it. In a subsequent post I’ll cover how to run this via the server to test out what the page would look like with all relative links.

jekyll

…and after execution the following message will display at the command line.

WARNING: Could not read configuration. Using defaults (and options).
	No such file or directory -- /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me/_config.yml
Building site: /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me -> /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me/_site
Successfully generated site: /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me -> /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me/_site

This warning isn’t super relevant just yet. We’ve got a basic generated jekyll site localted at /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me/_site where that path is your path to the _static directory within your git repository. Once the content is verified via the _static directory the site is ready to post.

git add -A
git commit -m 'Adding the index.html and basic layouts template for a starter jekyll site.'
git push origin gh-pages

After it pushes, it may take up to 10 minutes before it displays properly. This is likely because Github has to queue the jekyll command to run to statically generate your content for the gh-pages branch. To view the newly created site and see if the generation has occurred navigate to http://yourusername.github.io/Me/. In the case of my personal site, it’s http://adron.github.io/Me/. Also note, at this stage the page and CSS look pretty bad. But work with me here, we’re going to add elements that will align the theme with the actual project as things come together. This css page however will be a core base for everything we’ll work through.

This concludes part 1. I’ve covered created the Github Pages automatically created templates pages, how to delete those and setup a manually created jekyll site. This gives a huge amount of control to the site, to edit, add blogs or other jekyll and of course JavaScript capable site features.

In subsequent parts of this blog series I’ll cover diving into deployment to AWS (Amazon Web Services), how to setup beanstalk via AWS, setting up Riak for a data back end and how to distribute this web application and Riak to offer a massively scalable site architecture (because you never know when you’ll get slammed with page hits on your personal site righ!) Among all these massive distributed how-to topics I’ll also dive into how exactly I’ve got a template and node.js application up and running via AWS and using Riak. So lots of material and information coming in the subsequent parts of this blog series.

🙂 Please subscribe (see upper right follow link to get emails, and no, you’ll get NO spam from me, just blog entries), comment below if you have any questions & let me know if you’d like me to add in any other how-to articles. Thanks & Enjoy!

Coder Brad Heller, Cloudability & Riak

This coming April 29th (Monday) we’ll have Brad Heller coming in to give us the low down on how Cloudability has used Riak (click link meetup event). He sent me a short list outline of the topics he plans to hit. Here’s a few key data problems they’ve run into and how they’ve solved those problems with Riak & other solutions.

@Cloudability

  • What does Cloudability do?
  • Why do we like Riak?

  • Challenges of raw storage in our data pipeline.

  • Idempotency
  • Scale
  • Reliability
    • S3 vs. Riak
  • Queryable S3
  • Maintain “State”
    • Data Pipelines: Specific problems.
    • Idempotency
  • What has been processed?
  • How to figure out what to reprocess?
    • Scaling this.
  • Pipelines scale horizontally
  • Backpressure / failure modes
    • How do we use Riak to address these?
    • Raw data goes directly in Riak (metadata record, raw data record)
    • 2i on metadata record to find what needs processing
    • 2i on metadata record to find stuff to reprocess.
    • Atomic writes: Let Riak assign keys.
  • Duplicate Data is OK, idempotency maintained further down the chain.
  • Don’t worry about collisions–last one wins.
  • Predictable keys are helpful though.
    • Scale is built in!!
  • Read/write throughput gets better with more nodes.
    • What we don’t use.
    • Online MapReduce.
    • Only use for backoffice processes
  • When something isn’t indexed, identify bad data.
  • Add index.
    • Key filtering
  • Riak craps it’s pants.
    • Problems we’ve had
    • Ops is easy, but lots of unexpected behavior.
  • Riak eats all memory, craps it’s pants.
    • Erlang is hard.
  • Everyone on our team hates Erlang except me (Brad).
  • Stacktraces will confuse you a lot at first.
    • Riak is “expensive” compared to S3.
  • We run a ring of 5 m1.xlarge with EBS + provisioned IOPS.

That covers all the topics Brad wants to cover, which I’m sure that brings up a lot of questions already! So the presentation will be great and we’ll be sure to have a good chunk of time for questions and a few beers afterwards!

For more on Brad, give a follow on twitter @bradhe and endorse him for random skill sets like dishwasher programming and coffee cup holding on LinkedIn! Also you can read

Check out Cloudability for keeping tabs on your cloud compute spending. They are the leaders in helping companies manage their spend across many cloud offerings including AWS, Github, Heroku, Softlayer, Engineyard and others.

Red Hat, OpenShift PaaS and Cartridges for Riak

Today I participated in the OpenShift Community Day here in Portland at the Doubletree Hotel. One of the things I wanted to research was the possibility of putting together a OpenShift Origin Cartridge for Riak. As with most PaaS Systems this isn’t the most straight forward process. The reason is simple, OpenShift and CloudFoundry have a deployment model based around certain conventions that don’t fit with the multi-node deployment of a distributed database. But there are ways around this and my intent was to create or come up with a plan for a Cartridge to commit these work-arounds.

After reading the “New OpenShift Cartridge Format – Part 1” by Mike McGrath @Michael_Mcgrath I set out to get a Red Hat Enterprise Linux image up and running. The quickest route to that was to spool up an AWS EC2 instance. 30 seconds later I had exactly that up and running. The next goal was to get Riak installed and running on this instance. I wasn’t going to actually build a cluster right off, but I wanted at least a single running Riak node to use for trying this out.

In the article “New OpenShift Cartridge Format – Part 1” Mike skips the specifics of the cartridge and focuses on getting a service up and running that will be turned into a Cartridge. As Mike writes,

What do we really need to do to create an new cartridge? Step one is to pick something to create a cartridge for.

…to which my answer is, “alright, creating a Cartridge for Riak!”  😉

However, even though I have the RHEL instance up and running already, with Riak installed, I decided I’d follow along with his exactly example too. So I dove in with

sudo yum install httpd

to install Apache. With that done I now have Riak & Apache installed on the RHEL EC2 instance. The goal with both of these services is to get them running as the regular local Unix user in a home directory.

With both Riak and Apache installed, time to create a local user directory for each of the respective tools. However, before that, with this version of Linux on AWS we’ll need to create a local user account.

useradd -c "Adron Hall" adron
passwd adron

Changing password for user adron.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

Next I switched to the user I created ‘su adron’ and created the following directories in the home path for attempting to get Apache and Riak up and running locally like this. I reviewed the rest of the steps in making the Cartridge w/ Apache and then immediately started running into a few issues with getting Riak setup just like I need it to be able to build a cartridge around it. At least, with my first idea of how I should build a cartridge.

At this point I decided we need to have a conversation around the strategy here. So Bill Decoste, Ryan and some of the other Red Hat team on hand today. After a discussion with Bill it sounds like there are some possibilities to get Riak running via the OpenShift Origin Cartridges.

The Strategy

The plan now is to get a cartridge setup so that the cartridge can launch a single Riak instance. That instance, then with post-launch scripts can then join itself to the overall Riak cluster. The routing can be done via the internal routing and some other capabilities that are inherent to what is in OpenShift itself. It sounds like it’ll take a little more tweaking, but the possibility is there for the near future.

At this point I sat down and read up on the Cartridge a little more before taking off for the day. Overall a good start and interesting to get an overview of the latest around OpenShift.

Thanks to the Red Hat Team, have a great time at the OpenStack Conference and I’ll be hacking on this Cartridge strategy!

References