The Research Department is pleased to be able to offer something to the Buzztouch community: a new "how to" tutorial on setting up a self-hosted Buzztouch Control Panel on an Amazon Web Services EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) instance. When I became a member a few weeks ago, I started by trying to set up a self-hosted Control Panel on an EC2 Free Tier-eligible instance. I thought I had done it mostly correctly, so I went through the whole process again more carefully, taking screen shots and writing down the details as I proceeded, with the goal of making a "how to" guide. I ended up running into a few problems, some of which I was able to solve myself and others I had to bring here to the Buzztouch Forums, where veterans were able to help me solve the problems. There is an existing "how to" available on the Buzztouch web site on installing "Buzztouch Server 2.0" on an EC2 instance, but enough things have changed at EC2 and in the Buzztouch software that a new guide was worth making. This guide includes screenshots and goes into a lot more detail than the existing guides. It also includes steps added so the reader can avoid some of the mistakes I made despite having the old "how to" guides available. I added page footers with the page numbers. I added a clickable table of contents. The end result is that it's a 29-page PDF. That's pretty long, but I believe the length of the PDF is justified and compensated by its completeness. Using my "how to," a user should be able to start from scratch, set up an EC2 instance, install all the necessary supporting software on (LAMP stack, phpMyAdmin, cURL) on the instance, get the Buzztouch files and make a few modifications to them, put the Buzztouch files on the EC2 instance, set up the Buzztouch Control Panel on the instance, and validate the API key. I even included instructions for making sure the software on the instance is all up to date and for making backups and "machine images." I am not sure how to submit new "how to" guides, so I sent a copy of the current draft of my new guide to Susan. If anyone would like to see the current draft, contact me here and I'll be happy to send you a copy. I'm hoping it will be available on the Buzztouch "How To" page in the very near future. Now that I've finally got a complete draft of the new "how to" finished, I should have more time to focus on the fun part: developing plugins and apps!

Sweet! Although I don't use Amazon EC2, I love seeing more current documentation make it's way into the library! Thanks, and congratulations on what may have been a challenging install! Onward to bigger and better! :) Cheers! -- Smug

It might go without saying, but I want to make this explicit: by publishing this "how to," I am putting myself out there as an expert on self-hosted Control Panels on EC2. I am willing to help people with self-hosting problems, especially on EC2, but I'll ask the ones asking me about self-hosting on EC2 to use my tutorial and follow every step in it from the beginning, because I have put in specific steps to avoid some of the problems I had when trying to get my EC2 self-hosted Control Panel working, and the specific instructions for avoiding a given problem do not necessarily appear in the same part of the tutorial as where the problem itself might appear. For example, API key validation is done near the end, on page 28 (of 29, and only a couple of the references appear on page 29) of the tutorial, but there are steps much earlier in the tutorial (e.g., modifications to files on page 11, information entered on page 19) that, if followed, will prevent the user from having some of the problems with API key validation I had.

Lot's of hard work. Thanks for providing it to the BT community!

Good job, will be helpful to others.

I have decided that the current draft has a fatal flaw before the current draft has even been made available. Some of the Buzztouch files need to be modified on the server (in this case, EC2 instance) remotely, and the current draft has detailed instructions on how to do that using vi in a Terminal through which the user is remotely logged in to his or her EC2 instance. The problem is that if the user makes a mistake, he or she will have no idea how to fix it. So I'm going to redo those sections so the user can modify the files in FileZilla, which has a nice graphical interface.

Great stuff. How To's are always in need of updates as technology changes. I've never looked at the EC2 guide but now that I do and see all those terminal commands - I bet many folks never get thru that. That's pretty technical stuff for the average BT user. (Same reason I don't see folks here talking about Cocoa pods because that is done thru a terminal interface.) Definately easier for folks to use Filezilla to mod some of those files and change permissions. Good move. Thanks! :wq

Great Job RD! I´d like to check it out when ready. Thanks

Updating: I sent a new version of the tutorial to Susan. In the new version, I have the user use vi once to create a file for testing whether PHP is installed and working. The party where I had the user trying to use vi to remotely modify files on the EC2 instance have been rewritten so the user can use FileZilla and a familiar (local) text editing program. NOW I can start playing with my control panel.

Thanks again for reminding me about EC2 with your post. I just moved an install over there and it's working great. Never realized how much fun AWS is to play with. This is really a great option for folks to test out Self Hosting for free. I'm gonna build a couple of new instances and look at running BT server under MariaDB instead of MySQL. again, thanks :)

My "how to" still hasn't appeared, but I've worked in start-ups and I know something as low-priority as putting a "how to" up on the site might get put off for some time while the people who have the permissions to do that are busy putting out fires and taking care of other business, so I haven't sent any e-mails to ask if anything's wrong. If the "how to" doesn't show up in a few more days, I'll ask if there's something wrong with it that makes the Buzztouch folks not want to put it up on the site. I suspect not, but I'll ask anyway.

Hi RD - Could I get a copy of your latest draft? Thanks again for putting it together!