Deployment

At EasyBib, we’re heavy users of composer and AWS OpsWorks. Since we recently moved a lot of our applications to a continuous deployment model, the benefits of speeding up the deployment process (~4-5 minutes) became more obvious. Composer install Whenever we run composer install, there are a lot of rount-trips between the server, our satis and Github (or Amazon S3). One of my first ideas was to to get around a continous reinstall by symlinking the vendor directory between releases....

This is something experimental I have been working on for our chef deployments. So the objective was/is to find a sane way to install PEAR packages and install dependencies with composer. execute in chef recipes In chef recipes, almost everything is a resource. In case you’re just getting started with Chef, a list of current resources is available on the Opscode Wiki. It’s a link I put in my browser bar since I frequently work on chef recipes....

When I ran our setup on an instance the other day, I noticed how it failed with a “package not found” (or similar) error. After debugging this a bit, we discovered that Karmic moved from “archive.ubuntu.com” to “old-releases.ubuntu.com” (Probably diskspace or something — but who knows? :-)). And because the sources pointed to the former, it broke the bootstrap process on new and existing EC2 instances and Vagrant VMs for us....

These are some random operational things I learned about CouchDB. While I realize that my primary use-case (a CouchDB install with currently 230+ million documents) may be oversized for many, these are still things important things to know and to consider. And I would have loved to know of some of these before we grew that large. I hope these findings are useful for others. Compaction CouchDB doesn’t take great care of diskspace — the assumption is that disk is cheap....

One of our biggest issues with CouchDB is currently the lack of compaction of our database, and by lack of, I don’t mean that CouchDB doesn’t support it, I mean that we are unable to actually run it. Compaction in a nutshell Compaction in a nutshell is pretty cool. As you know, CouchDB is not very space-efficient. For once, CouchDB saves revisions of all documents. Which means, whenever you update a document a new revision is saved....