Overview

I was going to create a PaaS that would host projects made with Lift web framework. At first, it was a private repository on GitHub, but I made it public since I became too busy to keep on developping it.

I hope this will be of some interest of some people. Any comments/feedback would be appreciated.

See the slides on SlideShare.

How to set up the environment

I use CentOS 5.3.

Create users

'lifthub' and 'lifthubuser' are necessary for the system.

The management application, which runs on port 8080, runs under 'lifthub' privilege. This user also does the following.

• Set up a project
  • Copy a Lift template project (included in the Lift tarball).
  • Add some config files.
• Access the git repository and gitosis
• Invoke sbt
  • sbt update
  • sbt package
• Create/delete databases
• Create a config file for nginx

'lifthubuser' does the following.

• Start jetty instances for user apps by calling a shell script.
• Stop those instances using the jar file that comes with the jetty package.

Set up gitosis

See my blog entry

$ sudo yum install gitosis

lifthub$ ssh-keygen

Add the public key of 'lifthub' to gitosis-admin.

lifthub$ git clone gitosis@localhost:gitosis-admin.gitt

Now the gitosis.conf looks like the following.

[group gitosis-admin]
writable = gitosis-admin
members = kashima@localhost.localdomain lifthub@localhost.localdomain

Set the templates of user projects and jail environments

[lifthub@localhost ~]$ LANG=C ls -l
total 28
drwxrwxr-x 5 lifthub lifthub 4096 Feb 27 17:57 gitosis-admin
drwxrwxr-x 8 lifthub lifthub 4096 Mar  3 02:27 lifthub-sbt
drwxrwxr-x 4 lifthub lifthub 4096 Feb 17 21:17 nginx
drwxrwxr-x 3 lifthub lifthub 4096 Jan 17 00:46 projecttemplates
drwxrwxr-x 2 lifthub lifthub 4096 Mar  2 16:26 sbin
drwxrwxr-x 4 lifthub lifthub 4096 Mar  2 16:58 userprojects

[lifthubuser@localhost ~]$ LANG=C ls -l
total 28
drwxr-xr-x  4 root        root        4096 Mar  2 16:58 chroot
drwxrwxr-x 11 root        root        4096 Mar  1 14:22 jail-template
drwxrwxr-x  8 lifthubuser lifthubuser 4096 Feb 24 12:18 lifthub-sbt
drwxrwxr-x  2 lifthubuser lifthubuser 4096 Mar  2 16:19 sbin
drwxrwxr-x  4 lifthubuser lifthubuser 4096 Feb 25 15:01 servers

I'll upload necessary files somewhere.

sudoers

Add the following entries.

lifthub     localhost = NOPASSWD:/home/lifthub/sbin/*
lifthubuser localhost = NOPASSWD:/home/lifthubuser/sbin/*

nginx

nginx is used as a reverse proxy. You don't really need it for testing.

$ sudo yum install nginx

The RPM might not work. See my blog post

Create directories for the system.

lifthub$ mkdir ~/nginx/{conf.d,logs} 

TODO

I'm new to github. Maybe I should use the wiki and issue tracker?

• to be addressed before beta
  • Fix the conflict issue with 'git pull' (deleting all the files and git clone every time should be enough).
  • Make git operations thread safe.
  • Random password generation when sending an invitation mail.
  • Page for viewing log files.
  • Restrict project names. e.g. 'www' and some other names shouldn't be used.
• enhancements etc.
  • Add options for databases and components, including PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
  • Offer phpMyAdmin to end users.
  • Some design work (now it uses the default template as you see).
  • Payment??
  • Assign dedicated server instances to priority users.

(not finished yet)