BitNami MediaWiki for VMware

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What is the BitNami Application Library for VMware

The BitNami Application Library for VMware is a collection of popular open source applications that are prepackaged as application blueprints and ready to use with VMware vFabric™ Application Director. The library includes wikis, content and document management systems, portals, development tools, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and many other types of applications. You can learn more about them at http://bitnami.com/vmware

BitNami’s library for VMware consists of BitNami’s application components within reusable blueprints using industry’s leading Cloud-enabled application provisioning solution, VMware vFabric™ Application Director. The product takes a model-driven open approach to drastically simplify and automate application deployment topologies of portable multi-tier applications in private, public and hybrid clouds. These application topologies are called application blueprints. With the joint integration of BitNami application packages with VMware vFabric™ Application Director, users can rapidly deploy and customize applications across clouds per their enterprise IT policies.

The BitNami Application Library hooks up to existing services like Apache and MySQL, making it easy to deploy and manage your favorite applications.

Supported Platforms

The BitNami Application Library currently supports the following OS platforms:

  • CentOS 5.6: Both local and remote MySQL deployments

Support for RHEL and Ubuntu is planned.

Introduction to MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis. MediaWiki was designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day.

You can learn more about MediaWiki at (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki)

The following sections will explain how to launch and manage MediaWiki with VMware vFabric™ Application Director.

Identifying BitNami Services

Go to "Administration" in the Catalog section. Then in "Tags" create a new tag for BitNami. This will make easier to identify the BitNami services later when creating new Blueprints.

  • Name: BitNami

  • Description: Deployment of web applications

BitNami Tag
Figure 1: BitNami Tag

Creating a BitNami MediaWiki Service

Use an Application Director wizard to create a new service.

  • Service details:

MediaWiki Service Details
Figure 2: MediaWiki Service Details

  • Service properties:

MediaWiki Service Properties
Figure 3: MediaWiki Service Properties
MediaWiki Service Scripts
Figure 4: MediaWiki Service Scripts

Building Blueprints using the BitNami MediaWiki Service

Once you have created the BitNami MediaWiki service in your catalog, you can use it as a building block when you create your own Blueprints. To use BitNami MediaWiki in your own BluePrints, complete the following steps:

  • Add an OS Template supported by the service.

  • Add the Apache 2.2.0 Web Server service.

  • Add the MySQL 5.0.0 Database server service.

  • Add the BitNami MediaWiki service. Set the base_password property for the BitNami MediaWiki service to match the MySQL service password - self:MySQL:db_root_password. For remote database installations you can also set the mysql_hostname and the mysql_port properties.

MediaWiki Blueprint
Figure 5: MediaWiki Blueprint

Launching BitNami MediaWiki as a Blueprint

The BitNami MediaWiki Blueprint provides a server specification that includes:

  • Apache.

  • PHP.

  • MySQL.

  • A ready to run version of MediaWiki.

Blueprints make it easy to launch servers that share a well-defined, repeatable configuration. To launch a server based on a Blueprint, go to the Applications section in the vFabric UI and select one of the BitNami MediaWiki Blueprints available in the system.

You need to specify a value for the mediawiki_password property for the BitNami MediaWiki service. This is the password that will be used to log into the application.

Optionally, you can specify the following parameters:

  • mediawiki_user: The username that will be used to log in into the application. The default value is user.

  • mediawiki_user_name: Full name for the MediaWiki administrator user. The default value is User Name.

  • mediawiki_mail: MediaWiki administrator email address. The default value is mail@example.com.

Accessing your MediaWiki application

Once you have launched BitNami MediaWiki, you can view the details for the running machines in your deployment, including the IP of the server where MediaWiki is running. Pointing your browser to http://<ip>/mediawiki will take you to the main screen of your application. You will be presented with a login screen:

Login Screen
Figure 6: Login Screen

You can now enter the username and password provided at launch time to access the application.

Filesystem Layout

The installation of all BitNami applications is standardized. This section provides an overview of where each component is located in the event that you need to log in to your server, which you can do using the VMware console.

The standard location for the BitNami Library Application files is under /opt/bitnami. The following top-level folders are available:

  • mysql/: Contains configuration files related to MySQL. No MySQL binaries or libraries are bundled with BitNami for VMware deployments. Instead, the apps deployed integrate with the existing MySQL server provided by the distribution (either local or remote) and that has been configured using the VMware vFabric™ Application Director service template.

  • apache2/: Contains configuration files related to Apache. No Apache binaries or libraries are bundled with BitNami for VMware deployments. Instead, the apps deployed integrate with the existing Apache server provided by the distribution and that has been configured using the VMware vFabric™ Application Director service template.

  • scripts/: Control scripts internal to BitNami.

  • apps/: The directory containing the BitNami applications that have been installed.

And, inside apps/mediawiki folder:

  • You will find the application files for BitNami MediaWiki under apps/mediawiki/htdocs/.

  • Apache configuration files for BitNami MediaWiki, under apps/mediawiki/conf/ as well as optional configuration scripts under scripts/.

At the top level of the installation you will find the following additional files:

  • properties.ini: This file is readable only for the user that the installation was performed as. It includes information related to installation paths and configuration settings for the installed applications and associated services.

  • ctlscript.sh: Management script that allows you to start / stop different services. It provides a consistent interface across operating systems and services. You can find more information by typing /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart

The reason that all configuration and application files are located inside /opt/bitnami is to remain consistent with other BitNami application packages such as native installers and VMs that can be downloaded from (http://bitnami.com). Maintaining a common filesystem layout across operating systems and delivery mechanisms helps in many scenarios, such as moving from local laptop development environment to a vCloud production environment.

Additional resources

You can find additional information about BitNami Applications for VMware at http://bitnami.com/vmware

The BitNami VMware library is part of the BitNami platform. If you are an enterprise customer or service provider and are interested in running BitNami applications on your infrastructure, please contact us.