Today the EC2 machine that I have been using to run my blog application for the past couple years expires, so I had to move to a new instance. Unfortunately, while I had done a great job of automating the setup for my blog, I had not done a good job of automating the bootstrapping of the operating systems that I use. I think it is really important that system initialization steps be automated, so you can easily deploy additional nodes, rebuild exact systems from scratch, and quickly recover from a disaster.
To make things easier, I wrote a bootstrapping script for the two operating systems that I use (OSX and Ubuntu), which sets up the software I need to develop in Python and Node.js, and start the initialization script that is part of my blog repo. This article will introduce my bootstrapping script.
How do it…
The canonical reference will always be at https://gist.github.com/mattsnider/5485500. Here is what the script looked like at the time of this writing:
#!/bin/bash
# expects python is installed with OS distribution
# single line command for execution
# wget -O - <RAW_URL> | bash
# determine environment
if hash apt-get 2>/dev/null; then
echo "Bootstrapping UBUNTU"
UBUNTU=true
# update apt-get and install a C compiler
sudo apt-get -y update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade
sudo apt-get -y install gcc
else
echo "Bootstrapping OSX"
# on OSX we use brew as the application repo
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
brew doctor
OSX=true
fi
# install python, when necessary
if [ $UBUNTU ]; then
sudo apt-get -y install python-dev python-setuptools
fi
# setup pip and virtualenv
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper
mkdir $HOME/.virtualenvs
# install git
if [ $UBUNTU ]; then
sudo apt-get -y install git
fi
if [ $OSX ]; then
brew install git
fi
# install node and npm
if [ $UBUNTU ]; then
sudo apt-get install node npm
fi
if [ $OSX ]; then
brew install node npm
fi
To run the script as a single command, grab the raw URL from the gist and execute:
wget -O - <RAW_URL> | bash # eg. wget -O - https://gist.github.com/mattsnider/5485500/raw/ec8b38022145dac41b1ef4ad5dd262cc845b4ee0/bootstrap.sh | bash
How it works…
The script is broken up logically and comments atop each section describe what the section is doing. First, the code determines the operating system by checking if the program apt-get exists. For either OS a temporary variable is created to be used by later if statements. When the OS is Ubuntu, it updates apt-get and ensures that a C compiler is installed. When the OS is OSX, it installs brew which will be used as the application packaging tool for installing new software.
The next step is to ensure python and python-setuptools are installed, so we have python and can use easy_install to install pip. This is kept logically separate from the first step, in-case I decide to support additional operating systems in the future.
The third step installs pip, virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper, and ensures that the required ~/.virtualenv exists. These tools are a must have for any python developer.
Next the script installs git for repository management and lastly it installs node and npm for development in Node.js.
At this point the system is ready to run whatever initialization scripts you have for your application. For my blog, I need to manually clone the git repo, create a virtual environment, and install fabric in that environment. Then I have a fabric script that automates the rest of the installation.