Developers often only deploy Dataverse to their Development Environment but it can be useful to deploy Dataverse to cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Contents:
We have written scripts to deploy Dataverse to Amazon Web Services (AWS) but they require some setup.
First, you need to have AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) installed, which is called aws in your terminal. Launching your terminal and running the following command to print out the version of AWS CLI will tell you if it is installed or not:
aws --version
If you have not yet installed AWS CLI you should install it by following the instructions at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html
Afterwards, you should re-run the “version” command above to verify that AWS CLI has been properly installed. If “version” still doesn’t work, read on for troubleshooting advice. If “version” works, you can skip down to the “Configure AWS CLI” step.
Please note that as of this writing the AWS docs are not especially clear about how to fix errors such as aws: command not found. If the AWS CLI cannot be found after you followed the AWS installation docs, it is very likely that the aws program is not in your $PATH. $PATH is an “environment variable” that tells your shell (usually Bash) where to look for programs.
To see what $PATH is set to, run the following command:
echo $PATH
On Mac, to update your $PATH to include the location where the current AWS docs install AWS CLI on the version of Python included with your Mac, run the following command:
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/Library/Python/2.7/bin
After all this, you can try the “version” command again.
Note that it’s possible to add an export line like the one above to your ~/.bash_profile file so you don’t have to run it yourself when you open a new terminal.
Next you need to configure AWS CLI.
Create a .aws directory in your home directory (which is called ~) like this:
mkdir ~/.aws
We will be creating two plain text files in the .aws directory and it is important that these files do not end in ”.txt” or any other extension. After creating the files, you can verify their names with the following command:
ls ~/.aws
Create a plain text file at ~/.aws/config with the following content:
[default]
region = us-east-1
Please note that at this time the region must be set to “us-east-1” but in the future we could improve our scripts to support other regions.
Create a plain text file at ~/.aws/credentials with the following content:
[default]
aws_access_key_id = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
aws_secret_access_key = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Then update the file and replace the values for “aws_access_key_id” and “aws_secret_access_key” with your actual credentials by following the instructions at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/wheres-my-secret-access-key/
If you are having trouble configuring the files manually as described above, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html which documents the aws configure command.
Once you have done the configuration above, you are ready to try running the “create instance” script to spin up Dataverse in AWS.
Download ec2-create-instance.sh and put it somewhere reasonable. For the purpose of these instructions we’ll assume it’s in the “Downloads” directory in your home directory.
You need to decide which branch you’d like to deploy to AWS. Select a branch from https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/branches/all such as “develop” and pass it to the script with -b as in the following example. (Branches such as “master” and “develop” are described in the Version Control section.)
bash ~/Downloads/ec2-create-instance.sh -b develop
You must specify the branch with -b but you can also specify a non-IQSS git repo URL with -r as in the following example.
bash ~/Downloads/ec2-create-instance.sh -b develop -r https://github.com/scholarsportal/dataverse.git
Now you will need to wait around 15 minutes until the deployment is finished. Eventually, the output should tell you how to access the installation of Dataverse in a web browser or via ssh. It will also provide instructions on how to delete the instance when you are finished with it. Please be aware that AWS charges per minute for a running instance. You can also delete your instance from https://console.aws.amazon.com/console/home?region=us-east-1 .
Please note that while the script should work fine on newish branches, older branches that have different dependencies such as an older version of Solr are now expected to yield a working Dataverse installation. Your mileage may vary.
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