Testing library web apps on EC2

I wrote before about playing images within EC2. In the last week, I’ve gotten pretty serious and have been setting up from relative scratch a development/test environment using EC2 and Ubuntu. I decided to use Ubuntu because in some new projects I’m going to have to work with this flavor on Linux and I thought it would be best if I familiarized myself more with it.
All in all, making the transition wasn’t a big deal. Learn a new package manager and where stuff is located. I was able to get a basic LAMP server setup the way I wanted. The Ubuntu image I started from was a little easier to work with. My biggest issue was the way in which Ubuntu handles Apache. This was pretty different from other Linux flavors I’d dealt with but I’ve got it figured out now.

The big goal for the las week was to get SOPAC installed and some records pulled in. All and all it went pretty well, except SOPAC wants to be in the web root, which isn’t something I was able to do. So I’m going to have to reconfigure to make that happend and do some more testing.

What was easier than I thought it was going to be was getting Pazpar2, IndexData’s open source federated search tool install. Some tweaking of Apache configuration was needed to get the Apache webserver to sit in front of Pazpar2. All and all the install itself was a snap though. The more difficult with Pazpar2 is setting up targets to search. There is some good documentation on how to do this. Luckily, since I’m doing an extremely simple proof of concept, I could just test with a preconfigured set of targets that come with the package.

As part of my testing I’ve also installed several open source CMSs. ModX, Silverstripe, and XOOPs were all pretty easy to install. I’m looking forward to check each of these out in more depth over the next week.

All an all its been a pretty successful endeavor so far. I’ve got two more LAMP-based app to install, dbwiz and VuFind. dbwiz is Perl-based and I haven’t really been looking forward to that because I’m not a big fan of Perl. VuFind is PHP but uses Solr, so that’ll be a challenge. If I can get those done this week I’ll be really happy.

Next week’s goal will be goal to setup a Rails test environment and install LibraryFind and Blacklight. If anyone has done this before in EC-2 and wants to offer pointers or links to documentation, I’d be grateful. I’ve never really successfully gotten a Rails rest environment setup. So I’m thinking that next week will involve a substantial amount of frustration. Unless I get REALLY lucky.