dhis2-tools, observations after use with Sudan

[whotopia]

Bob, Bob -reposting here on your suggestion from email:

I've made a laundry list of potential/suggested additions to the dhis2tools. I wonder your thoughts on these and if you have considered them before.

dhis2-list-instances similar to ps command returns all instances, the tcp port they are running on, their running state have a flag in each directory letting dhis2-tools know if an instance is managed by dhis2-tools, or not. thereby allowing foreign, custom-configured instances to be installed.

dhis2-remove-instance cleans up user, data bases, /var/lib/dhis2/xx files, crontabs etc the rm -rf of the dhis2-tools world

nginx auto config for instances

• improve nginx setup so that creating an instance optionally adds appropriate lines to the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/dhis2 script to automatically enable proxying
• implement this using a nginx template file, which can further be customised. concat together a new conf file on each run.

nginx http behaviour

• install ssi module for nginx by default
• install gz module for nginx by default
• create a default index.html file for the HTTP requests
• create a default directory in HTTP space for option splash screens welcome pages. e.g. see http://www.his.gov.sd
• dhis2-instance-* scripts should maintain ssi snip for inclusion into the index.html listing all DHIS2 instances on the system with appropriate links (html to have named
  tags for CSS)
• (optionally) also make a link to the log files and allow the catalina.out for each instance to be quickly seen on the web (good for training, testing)
• (optionally) allow a directory for static files (as emailed earlier) to have a consistent way to deal with the logos, images

dhis2-instance-backup

• creates a FULL backup (database, tomcat files etc) for a running DHIS2 instance.
• package this up into a tar.gz with meta data files, datetimestamp etc.
• optional password encrypt file?

dhis2-instance-restore

• allows for restoration of a full working DHIS2 instance file (created by dhis2-instance-backup) to be restored and turned on
• allows for one-step re-deployment of instance.
• optionally allow instance to be renamed on re-deployment

dhis2-instance-rename

• allows a DHIS2 instance to be renamed. changes the name of the associated user, database and web application location

recipe for phppgadmin

• users generally want to maintain or have access to the database backend.
• what I have done is allow apt-get install phppgadmin to do what it naturally does (install Apache2) then set Apache2 to a 808x port, then proxy the apache instance via nginx, but warning there are all kinds of URL path problems that may result if users go beyond simple /foo directory proxy.
• having this set up allows users to also add any other ubuntu native programs they might like, and, assuming the program is not in / but /foo URL space it should just work.
• automate something like this into dhis2-pgadmin-install ??
• default php.ini is poorly configured for phppgadmin. It needs to have timeouts and session transfer data size adjusted upwards for things to work.

Set up a consistent way to manage the http_proxy, https_proxy and ftp_proxy environment variables so that wget and git work properly

• implies fixing up install.sh
• war file deployment script

For training scenarios, on one server, you may want to deploy more than one DHIS2 instance at the same time

• currently the dhis2-deploy-war uses the SAME /tmp/dhis2.war filename. therefore if the deploy script is run more than once, the download will step on one another. fix the file name in /tmp so that it is unique.
• keep the war file somewhere and before downloaded compare md5 keys. only download if necessary

[bobjolliffe]

these need to be broken up into separate issues and triaged. Some useful ideas.

[bobjolliffe]

new issues created.