How to deploy CRX on Amazon EC2

Question

How can I automatically install the CRX repository on an Amazon EC2 instance. Amazon provides an infrastructure-as-a-service platform - called EC2 - that can be used to host CRX repositories. This document the necessary steps to setup and run CRX on EC2.

Pre-requirements:

• System administration skills with Linux
• for Windows users - know how to connect to Linux via SSH

Answer

This is a step-by-step guide.

Step 1

1. Sign-up for Amazon EC2 on: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
2. Get familiar with the service: tasks such as start and stop instances, get access with SSH

Tutorial for Mac users: Starting Amazon EC2 with Mac OS X (on reactive.io)
Tutorial for Windows users: Managing Amazon EC2 with Windows (on keywordintellect.com)

Step 2

1. Create a Security Group that has Port 22 and 7402 open.
2. Start an EC2 instance. We recommend Linux CentOS AIMs - for example:
   • ami-4a24d623 (411009282317/RightImage_CentOS_5.4_x64_v5.6.28_EBS) for 64bit
   • ami-5624d63f (411009282317/RightImage_CentOS_5.4_i386_v5.6.28_EBS) for 32bit
     
3. Download the shell script aws-deploy-crx220-public.sh at the bottom of this page. This script executed from your local machine against the EC2 instance installs Java, sets the permissions, installs CRX and starts it.
4. Open the downloaded script in an editor and add your license key under LICENSE_KEY. If you don't have a license yet - get a Developer license here. Set if you install on a 32bit or 64bit EC2 instance and feel free to change the port number.
   
5. Run the following command in the local terminal/command line. Replace the location of the ssh key and the hostname of the EC2 instance.
   • on Linux/Mac: cat aws-deploy-crx220-linux-public.sh | ssh -i ~/.ssh/ec2-keypair root@ec2- .compute-1.amazonaws.com
   • on Windows (Cygwin users): use the same command as on Linux/Mac
   • on Windows (PuTTY users): use plink root@ec2- .compute-1.amazonaws.com aws-deploy-crx220-linux-public.sh
6. Wait until the script is finish. Then use the browser and browse to EC2 instance hostname on port 7402.

The script does following:

• installes Java 6 SDK
  
• CRX is installed in /mnt/crx/crx-quickstart/..
• creates an user crx to run the java process

Step 3

To start/stop CRX, go into the directory /mnt/crx/crx-quickstart/server

• start server: su -s /bin/bash crx ./start
• stop server: ./stop

To backup CRX, use the method documented on Online Backup. Note that the script installs the repository on a volatile disk.

Applies

CRX 2.2.0