Enterprise Drupal

IO1 have put up a public Drupal AMI for Amazon EC2 aimed primarily at Drupal Developers.

Basically its quite simple, normally when people create an AMI, they use a specific Drupal version in the AMI which while useful is somewhat limiting as you have to wait for someone to create the next AMI for the build of Drupal you want.

So what we have done is set it up so that you can decide what version of Drupal you run when you initialise the machine, the build will go to Drupal.org, get the version of Drupal you choose and setup the machine with that version ready to use.

We did this for ourselves so that we could quickly run up servers dedicated to testing specific modules without having to worry about the Server its on. It should be especially useful for creating test servers but obviously can be used for anything you want. CVS is installed to make it a bit easier to grab the modules you want to test.

Its not one of our hardened production server setups but its probably as secure as most hosting builds, I would strongly advise that you harden the build yourself if you want to use it in a production environment.

Thanks to jonnie and john for this one.

Technical details

The image is based on the standard Amazon FC8 image. On start up it automatically downloads and installs the latest version of Drupal core unless you specific otherwise.

• The AMI ID of the image is: ami-4c7b9e25
• It will install the latest version of Drupal 6.x unless you specify a different core version with the -d parameter.
• So, for example, if you want to create a Drupal 5.x instance:
• ec2-run-instances ami-4c7b9e25 -k gsg-keypair -d 5
• The -k parameter is mandatory, as there is no root password so you will have to log in with an ssh key
• Default user name/passwords are both: drupal

Its not listed in the amazon directory yet, but we have submitted it so should be there in the next few days (don't know how long it takes for them to list it). 

Hope you find it useful.