To help people to get started with the FixMyStreet platform, we have created an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) with a basic installation of FixMyStreet, which you can use to create a running server on an Amazon EC2 instance.
If you haven’t used Amazon Web Services before, then you can get a Micro instance which will be free for a year.
The AMI can be found in the EU West (Ireland) region, with the ID ami-65a8bf11 and name “Basic FixMyStreet installation 2013-05-03”. You can launch an instance based on that AMI with this link.
When you create an EC2 instance based on that AMI, make sure that you choose Security Groups that allows at least inbound HTTP, HTTPS and SSH.
When your EC2 instance is launched, you will be able to log in as the ubuntu user. This user can sudo freely to run commands as root. However, the code is actually owned by (and runs as) the fms user. After creating the instance, you may want to edit a configuration file to set a couple of parameters. That configuration file is /home/fms/fixmystreet/conf/general.yml, which can be edited with:
ubuntu@ip-10-58-191-98:~$ sudo su - fms
fms@ip-10-58-191-98:~$ cd fixmystreet
fms@ip-10-58-191-98:~/fixmystreet$ nano conf/general.ymlYou should set CONTACT_EMAIL and DO_NOT_REPLY_EMAIL to your email address or whatever you wish to use. postfix is installed so that outgoing email will work, but this may need further configuration.
Then you should restart the Catalyst FastCGI server with:
fms@ip-10-58-191-98:~/fixmystreet$ logout
ubuntu@ip-10-58-191-98:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/fixmystreet restartIf you find the hostname of your EC2 instance from the AWS console, you should then be able to see the site at http://your-ec2-hostname.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com
By default, the admin part of the website (/admin) is password protected (with HTTP basic authentication). In order to use this interface, you will need to create a username and password for one or more admin users. To add such a user, you can use the htpasswd command from the apache2-utils packages, as follows:
ubuntu@ip-10-58-66-208:~$ sudo apt-get install apache2-utils
[...]
ubuntu@ip-10-58-66-208:~$ sudo su - fms
fms@ip-10-58-191-98:~$ htpasswd /var/www/fixmystreet/admin-htpasswd fmsadmin
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user fmsadminThis basic installation uses the default cobrand, with a (deliberately) rather garish colour scheme. You should then proceed to customise your installation.
Please also see the instructions for updating your installation.