SVN Client on Bitnami LAMP Stack

The Bitnami LAMP stack doesn’t have an SVN server or client binaries available so you will need to compile in your own if you want to use SVN to deploy and manage your web sites on Bitnami.

First Attempt

wget http://mirror.rackcentral.com.au/apache/subversion/subversion-1.8.13.tar.bz2

wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-amalgamation-3071501.zip

mv sqlite-amalgamation-3071501 sqlite-amalgamation
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

vim Makefile <– yes I added -liconv as link time option
sudo apt-get install libaprutil1
./configure
sudo make install

An update – the svn I built didn’t actually work over http/https so failed at checkin time. (svn status operations were ok)

Something to do with cerf not being configured in svn.

Next Try

Decided it was getting too hard and the rabbit warren was looming.

So tried something else, used a link to an install script from wandisco for a Ubuntu version of subversion.

Download Subversion Server and Client (SVN)

Apache Subversion downloads you can trust

Fully-tested, certified Subversion binaries from WANdisco

After giving them my email address, and renaming the downloaded script, and sudo-ing the install script I got a much better svn binary. Had to delete the old binary because despite the scripts claim to do so, it didn’t update the existing binary.

The download link was something like

http://wandisco.com/system/files/subversion/subversion_installer_1.9.sh?access=XYZ

Seems you need to register to get your own script download.

Anyways it worked fine and didn’t seem to disturb anything else.

Client Only So Far

There was something I remember about this only be suitable for SVN as a client though, one more step needed to deploy a SVN server.

sendy SES on t2.micro AWS EC2 – cheap as chips!

I simply couldn’t get the cron jobs to run reliably in my hosting VPS at siteground – they have a very strict security model that was not compatible with sendy’s reliance on cron.

So I created the following to run my list of almost 3,000 members using sendy and Amazon SES.

Amazon EC2 Instance N. Virginia.

t2.micro free instance for 1 year. Can get 1Gb RAM if you choose the HVM version of Bitnami.

Using the Bitnami HVM AMI

bitnami-lampstack-5.5.25-0-linux-ubuntu-14.04.1-x86_64-hvm

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00NNZUY96/ref=srh_res_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-8&qid=1439775790029

Use System Log under Actions in the AWS console to see the root password that is echoed at startup. This will allow you access to mysql to create the sendy database etc.

I created a new subdomain for sendy so the EC2 instance just handles the subscribe/unsubscribe web impressions and also sends the actual emails to SES when sendy runs. Sendy license worked just fine in new subdomain off my existing domain without needing to ask for a license update.

For easy of managing mysql, I installed adminer as I can’t stand phpmyadmin’s installation craziness anymore. (www.adminer.org)

This is what my crontab entries look like

*/5 * * * * /opt/bitnami/php/bin/php //opt/bitnami/apache2/htdocs/MYINSTALL/scheduled.php > /dev/null 2>&1

*/5 * * * * /opt/bitnami/php/bin/php //opt/bitnami/apache2/htdocs/MYINSTALL/autoresponders.php > /dev/null 2>&1

I just tar’red up my sendy install and used ssh copy to move it and adminer to export the DB and import it back again on the new site.

I underestimated how important a well functioning cron is to sendy – you have to have cron working well for sendy to work properly. EC2 gives you so much more freedom to control your server now compared to a locked down hosting environment. Mind you, you are responsible for the security of it all now.

It seems that I can send the maximum rate of around 14 a second, so campaigns go out quite quickly.

Compared to paying $30 a month to mailchimp, sendy and SES are a much better option. Especially for a low volume list – and for a year for free with AWS too.

It takes quite a bit of setting up to get sendy.co running and to configured Amazon SES, but it is so much cheaper than mailchimp for lists over 2,000 members.

[update:] not sure exactly why, but now the sendy installation is telling me that I can send 20 emails a second, so I updated the configuration and it can cope quite fine with the slightly higher send rate.

copied the value to here

Hear me squeak

I’m giving 2 talks for WordPress users in Perth the coming months.

Firstly in May;

Free Secure WordPress sites for everyone. Get your green padlock here!

Sunday, May 1, 2016, 3:00 PM

Enigma Digital

23/25 Murray St, Como (map)

David Pascoe will walk us through SSL and HTTPS for WordPress. Learn how to install an SSL certificate and why it’s important for the security of your site, and for better Google Rankings.

Now that free SSL certificates are available from the LetsEncrypt Certificate Authority, your WordPress site should be running as a secure web site. Find out why your site should be using a SSL certificate, what is LetsEncrypt and how you can install a certificate and update your site to start showing a nice warm feeling via a green padlock to all your web site visitors.

and in July

Blog writing clients – calypso vs. windows live writer vs wordpress.com – fight!

Sunday, July 3, 2016, 3:00 PM

Enigma Digital

23/25 Murray St, Como (map)

Creating Blog Posts – whats new in blog writing clients – calypso vs. windows live writer vs wordpress.com – fight!

If you want  to know what blogging client you should use to create and manage your WordPress site’s content, then this is for you. The much loved Windows Live Writer has recently been released as open source and WordPress has released a desktop blogging client based around a project called Calypso. Get familiar with WLW and Calypso and see they might offer you something better than using your WordPress dashboard to manager your site’s content.

This month’s speaker is David Pascoe

Come along!

LetsEncrypt now on cPanel on SiteGround

SiteGround is just an awesome WordPress host.

The latest proof of their awesomeness is the ability to install a free SSL certificate for every domain you host there. These free certs come from the LetsEncrypt project, and don’t require any fussy registrations or proof of name or anything – just one click and the cert is generated and installed for you.

In just a few seconds I upgraded all 11 of my sites on my VPS Cloud Server to support SSL, edited the .htaccess files and voila – now all of my sites are secure.

LetsEncrypt cPanel Widget

This is what the LetsEncrypt widget looks like.

Just select the domain you want to create the certificate for, supply an email address and it will be generated and installed with one click.

 

The SiteGround implementation promises to renew the certificates every 90 days automatically for you.

The whole process couldn’t be easier !

Here is their product announcement: Let’s Encrypt is Here – Open Source Security Certificates Available at SiteGround

Now you just need to update your sitemap, find all all hard references to http:// and code your .htaccess redirect file.

Redirecting http to https for wordpress sites

I installed a security certificate and moved my site to https recently and took a bit of fiddling to get the redirect from the old URL of

http://rosacea-support.org/*

to

https://rosacea-support.org/*

Here is the fragment of code in .htaccess that will redirect all of the pages to their new https home.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(rosacea-support.org)$
RewriteRule .* https://rosacea-support.org%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

The main problem I had originally was that many of the other domains I have hosted on the same platform would redirect to the https://rosacea-support.org new address as well – breaking all those sites.

So including the extra RewrtieCond to match only 1 HTTP_HOST solved this problem.

Both conditions must be met, ie. https is not set, and the http host is rosacea-support.org, and then all URLs are rewritten, and redirected permanently to https:// instead.