Paul Dowman

UPDATE: it’s 0.9.8.1 now, there was a small update to the RubyGem. The new gem uses the same AMI’s.

EC2 on Rails version 0.9.8 is now available (or will be in a few hours when the RubyForge servers are synced). This is a recommended update for everyone.

It includes some major new features:

• monit monitoring daemon: monitors mysqld, apache, memcached, mongrels, system load and free drive space
• incremental MySQL backup (important for large databases)
• Apache SSL support
• a local Postfix SMTP server enabled by default

And most importantly this fixes the problem with broken Ubuntu package updates which was caused by a missing repository in the list of repositories.

As I mentioned yesterday, the base image is now built using Eric Hammond’s EC2 Ubuntu script.

Also, there are major new features such as incremental MySQL backup (important for large databases), Apache SSL support, and a local Postfix SMTP server enabled by default.

My priorities now are:

1. Release an update based on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy (this version is still using Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy because I wanted to provide a reliable update as quickly as possible due to bug #20040. But now that the base image is built with Eric Hammond’s script it should be easy to update to Hardy.)
2. Create complete documentation.
3. Release a 100% bug-free version 1.0 with the current feature-set. Please help by reporting any bugs you find, either using the RubyForge bug tracker or by email.

The point of EC2 on Rails is to save other people from duplicating the effort of building and configuring a Rails server on EC2. When I started it there were no other public Ubuntu server image projects so I had to start from scratch. I had to write a build script to build an Ubuntu image, patch the Amazon AMI tools to work on Ubuntu, etc., before I could even begin to create the Rails-specific stuff. And every 6 months there’s a new version of Ubuntu and I have to do at least some of that over again.

But in the meantime Eric Hammond has created an excellent Ubuntu AMI base install project, it has all the necessary features like installing the AMI tools, getting the public keys on first boot so that you can log in with your EC2 account’s private key, regenerating the ssh host keys on first boot, etc. And it has some cool new features like the ability to give an instance an arbitrary script on startup using EC2’s “user-supplied instance data“. And, it has an active community.

So why would I duplicate that effort?! I’d rather concentrate on improving the Rails-specific features, so I’ve adapted my build script to be run from Eric’s. And by “adapted”, I mean “took out tons of stuff that I no longer need to care about”! And when I want to make any improvements that aren’t Rails-specific, I can contribute them to Eric’s project where they’ll benefit more people.

If you’re building your own custom AMI, I highly recommend using Eric’s base install script. You’ll end up with a solid base for your image with way less work, and it has a hook to easily include your own build script to customize the build.

Version 0.9.8 of EC2 on Rails uses Eric’s script for the base install, and it will be released in a couple of days (I’m using it in production already).

Seriously, why reinvent the wheel? You gotta love open source!