I came across the following idea recently.
How to setup and host wordpress website using one of auto-scaling infrastructure provided in Amazon Web Services. Which can be described as below:

It called Elastic Cluster Services (ECS) which come with the Task Definition and Services setting then can be setup to has some part exposed to outside world via Application Load Balancer (ALB).
The database is running on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
The user uploaded images is hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) combined with a wordpress plugin called WP Offload Media Lite. While the whole wordpress codebases is stored on Elastic Filesystem (EFS) then mounted via Network File System (NFS) on each instance.
And all these are available for FREE because it is part of AWS Free Tier.
(first one year).
Except if you somehow scaled the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in “ECS

Roughly, here is the receipt on how to setup ECS with RDS, EFS and S3 that would work with vanilla wordpress.

1. Setup a new AWS account (so that you will be eligible for the Free Tier)
– this will need a new credit card that can be charged on overseas.
– I opted to a call from AWS to verify the contact number instead of the SMS.

2. Setup the VPC that split between “Public Subnet” and “Private Subnet”
– Because you will not wanting any of your ECS task being assigned a Public IPv4 address upon spinning up.

3. Setup Subnets and its NAT Gateway for the privates ones.
– you will need at least two of them each, to support the High Availability Zone.

4. Setup RDS with the internal access only allowed.
– set with security group that allow connection to 3306 port
– from your defined subnets.
– I just select MySQL 8.0.21 for the version running on t2.micro/10Gb (Free Tier)

5. Setup S3 bucket
– that will sit in the public subnet and allowed public access to its.

6. Setup EFS
– I just set the minimal size for this as per Free Tier.
– this should sit in the private subnet and allowed only your private subnets IPs to access it.

7. Create an IAM policy roles
– that will be able to use S3 and EFS infrastructure.
– should be able to read/write the S3 bucket
– should be able to mount/read/write the EFS

8. Setup Application Load Balancer for port HTTP and HTTPS (port 80/443)
– the target should be IPs on the ECS instances -> Task.

9. Setup the ECS Cluster infra
– Set it to be tied to your VPC and Subnet (public)
– For this one I just select t2.micro
– for the setup, you want to tied this your public subnet first instance to ensure everything can
be connected.
– set to run with key/pair for SSH access in cases need to debug it.

10. Setup the ECS’s Task definitions.
– here you should be able to add the EFS endpoint and mount it to “/var/www/html”
– Set the image source to point to wordpress:latest
– Define the working directory to “/var/www/html”
– Define the Docker variable of WORDPRESS_DB, WORPRESS_HOST, etc

11. Setup the Service from the Task.
– Here will be set the option to point to Application Load Balancer.
– that will be updated with latest target whenever new task is running.

12. Setup the security group for the ALB
– Set the certificates for the HTTPS
– and allow public access to it. port 80 and port 443.

Continue reading this post…

Happy Malaysia Day !

Today is 16 September 2020.

We are still in the middle of Recovery Movement Control Order (RMCO)
which is has been extended to 31st December 2020.
It meant will be only might be fully lifted next year, 2021.

Take care everyone!

I come across an useful tool to monitoring web application performance — newrelic.com

It come very handy to find the root cause for the bottleneck issue in one of our PHP application. I managed to pinpoint where exactly the root cause of the problem from the useful graph of the newrelic dashboard.

If you are familiar with xdebug tool which can be used to drill down the function being called that lead to the highest load or waiting time.
Newrelic dashboard APM offer almost similar thing, but the different is almost realtime with the agent installed on the application host.

In order to install the newrelic agent, firstly you need to register an account in newrelic.com
Luckily they had just offered FREE access for minimal dashboard.
previously it had trial 14-days. the detail are as below.

You can head to their website to find out their features and sign up for its free access.
After signup you can then find the license_key that will be needed for the infra agent setup.

Sample of installation step for the centos or redhat based OS would be as simple as below:

# Create a configuration file and add your license key

echo "license_key: xxxxx" |  tee -a /etc/newrelic-infra.yml

# Create the agent’s yum repository \
<

 curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/newrelic-infra.repo https://download.newrelic.com/infrastructure_agent/linux/yum/el/6/x86_64/newrelic-infra.repo

# Update your yum cache

 yum -q makecache -y --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo='newrelic-infra'

# Run the installation script

 yum install newrelic-infra -y

then just start it. and after few minutes of traffic, you can start analysing the result in the newrelic dashboard.

Goodluck!

My edit post and add new post has been a blank page.
I could not even publish any of the previous post draft.

After a google search, the solutions is to install back the classic editor.
I guess the Guttenberg editor maybe not compatible with the updates.

Weird though, how can it pass and installed the update.

anyway, the solution for this issue is :

Go to the “Plugins” > Add new >

Install the “Classic Editor” and activate.
.
.

Let’s say you just want to have Joomla with its Mysql and also redis infrastructure ready.
And don’t want to bother setting it up manually for each services.

Just make a docker-compose.yaml with the following content and then start it up.

version: '3.1'

services:
  web:
    image: joomla
    restart: always
    links:
      - db:mysql
      - redis:cache
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - "./html:/var/www/html"
      - "./php/php.ini:/usr/local/etc/php/php.ini"
    environment:
        JOOMLA_DB: ${MYSQL_DB}
        JOOMLA_DB_HOST: db
        JOOMLA_DB_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}

  db:
    image: mysql:5.6
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - "./mysql:/var/lib/mysql"
    environment:
        MYSQL_DATABASE: ${MYSQL_DB}
        MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}

  redis:
    image: redis
    container_name: cache
    ports:
        - "6379:6379"
    restart: always    

then create an .env file with the content for above parameters.

MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password # set to whatever here
MYSQL_DB=dbname # set approriate database name here

If you have an pre-compiled quickstart file, just extract it into `html` folder.

Then just start the docker with

docker-compose up -d

During install process at http://localhost/installation
just enter the password and db name credential similar to what have been defined in `.env` file.

I come across the zsh terminal after an upgrade of MacOS to Catalina recently. Where it suggest me to use zsh as default terminal instead of bash.
After searching around about zsh, I found there is a useful plugins and very nice themes.
I was always wondering how to get the customised console display for dev environment where I can easily know which branch I am currently in. And possibly few other information such as current time. 😛

brew install zsh

So, I found the following is useful for zsh.
Oh My zsh , which can be easily installed from the following Oh My Zsh repository. https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/

I used the manual method as below:

git clone https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh.git ~/.oh-my-zsh
cp ~/.oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc
chsh -s $(which zsh)

I personally like the `powerlevel9k` themes and few other useful plugins.
So I did the following further customisation.

git clone https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k.git ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/powerlevel9k
 
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-docker.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-docker
 
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions
 
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting

Install fonts needed for powerline:
Continue reading this post…

In development environment you might want to test the integration between your code and some endpoint of the AWS services.

To minimise the cost, you might want to find a cheaper alternative instead of setting up the full set of the production infrastructure (copy) just for the development purpose.
(Well, if the cost is not an issue for you, then may be you not to read the remaining part.8-))

Firstly, there is a mock docker images for most the useful AWS services.
It is from localstack/localstack (github (localstack) https://github.com/localstack/localstack)

For a starter, if you just want to have docker-compose and start everything.
just copy its docker-compose.yaml into a folder.

version: "2"
    localstack:
      image: localstack/localstack
      ports: 
        - 4567-4584:4567-4584
        - 8080:8080
      environment:
        - DATA_DIR=/tmp/localstack/data
      volumes:
        - ./localstack:/tmp/localstack

then do a docker-compose up

docker-compose up

it should be able to pull and fetch all the necessary image to complete.
Once done, it will be ready to use.

Once done, by default there is a Web UI running at port 8080,
but I’m not sure as nothing else come out, except the following empty page,
asking to get to localstack pro instead.

Then, I dig around and found the following useful package UI for the dashboard.
The Commandeer. (https://getcommandeer.com/)

It give me some UI to access/create my local AWS services such as S3 bucket, SQS, SNS, etc.

and also the some overview about the other infra like docker container list itself.

First, grab docker image from docker hubs repository

docker pull amazonlinux

run and get into its bash :

docker run -it --rm amazonlinux /bin/bash

actually you can run have any other flavor as well, such as centos.

Then, once it is running, you can perform any package installation needed. i.e httpd and php7.3 for my case.

yum install httpd
amazon-linux-extras install -y php7.3

Now, time to try commit this image.
get the container id while its running.

C:\Users\user>docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
82001296bbdc amazonlinux "bash" 26 minutes ago Up 26 minutes festive_bohr

commit the container as new image:

C:\Users\user>docker commit 82001296bbdc amazonlinux-with-php7.3
sha256:54f6cc3f5f73dcfc656a006f8d7eb96740196cca841ee7544d2349454dcfed69

show list of images:

C:\Users\user>docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
amazonlinux-with-php7.3 latest 54f6cc3f5f73 24 seconds ago 531MB
amazonlinux latest 6ef285e58e33 2 months ago 163MB
centos latest 0f3e07c0138f 3 months ago 220MB

Ok, now time to push it out.
login to docker from command line.

C:\Users\user>docker login --username=namran
Password:
Login Succeeded

list of images:

C:\Users\user>docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
amazonlinux-with-php7.3 latest 54f6cc3f5f73 2 minutes ago 531MB
amazonlinux latest 6ef285e58e33 2 months ago 163MB
centos latest 0f3e07c0138f 3 months ago 220MB

create docker tags:

 
C:\Users\user>docker tag 54f6cc3f5f73 namran/amazonlinux-with-php7.3:0.001

Finally, push it out to repository:

C:\Users\user>docker push namran/amazonlinux-with-php7.3
The push refers to repository [docker.io/namran/amazonlinux-with-php7.3]
d07f916bac18: Pushing [=> ] 10.44MB/368.1MB fdf6c4a26006: Mounted from library/amazonlinux

once done, result will be like this.

then you can check at the docker repository, i.e https://hub.docker.com/u/namran

That’s it. pretty simple, right?

I come across to have some changes of the permanent link on my blog.

The requirement for the URL change are simple:
1. must have category slug in the URL
2. the old existing URL will be able to be redirected to new one.

so, how to do it?

Firstly, just download the plugin to take care of the redirection of old postname only urnl to new one.

you can download it from https://wordpress.org/plugins/postname-permalink-auto-redirect/

then just go to permalink setting, change it to custom with parameter as :

“/%category%/%postname%/”

to test, just hit the old url and check the “network” tab in inspect tool.
it should have been redirected successfully to new URL.

Goodluck.