ubuntu

On this post, I'll be explaining as granular as possible how to configure an Ubuntu Server so you can run Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 or Drupal 9 sites or any PHP application on your local environment for development. We'll be using Ubuntu 18.04 which is the latest release until the date of this post and the php/apache packages provided by the distro and it will provide PHP 7.2 packages that are recommended for Drupal development.

This post is targeted for Apache Server only, which i think is the most robust web server for Drupal but overall the best option to run PHP applications natively. You can read more on the following links how to configure Drupal for other web servers or configurations such as Nginx if you are interested.

Let's start by getting the required packages:

$ sudo…
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Saturday, March 16, 2019

Usually in the enterprise world RAID systems are the most popular and used infrastructures when it comes to data backup and data synchronization but NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices can really improve these processes on small and mid-businesses due to the reduce costs in its implementation and since they are fast and reliable solutions.

On this quick tutorial I'm gonna show you how to backup a directory hosted on an Ubuntu Server and transfer the data to a Network Shared Folder hosted on a NAS. I'm assuming you already have a NAS storage up and running on your local network and a folder is already shared.

First we need to get the following extra packages from the Ubuntu repository that will provide the ability to mount this…

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Wednesday, March 15, 2017

On a previous post I already explained briefly what Varnish is and the advantages of running it along with Pound to get an amazing caching architecture under HTTPS for Drupal. On this tutorial I'll upgrade the steps so we can run both, Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 sites with Varnish 4.x which at the time of this post, is the latest supported by Drupal 8. Also, the Ubuntu version used is 16.04 which is the latest LTS release from the Ubuntu guys.

Alright, let's begin by getting the required packages. First, we need to get Pound, a version superior to 2.7 which implements fixes for Poodle attacks. Visit this…

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Development and put on production of Drupal 8 sites is moving really fast, and demanding sites are always going to require strong search engines to quickly process thousands  of search requests to their sites. On this tutorial I'm going to show you how to install an Apache Solr server to index any Drupal 8 data for fast search queries and results. Drupal 7 sites will also benefit of this since we are taking advantage of the Search API and Search API Solr modules integration.

Drupal 8 requires a minimum version of Solr 4.x so for this tutorial we'll be using 4.5.1, we'll be also configuring our installation using Jetty 9 (a servlet…

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Thursday, February 9, 2017

On this post I'll show you how to run Drupal 8 or any PHP application using Apache HTTP Server with mod_event enabled and PHP 7-FPM

First we need to get the required PHP and Apache packages from the Ubuntu repository:

$sudo apt-get install php7.0-fpm apache2 libapache2-mod-fastcgi

then we need to disable the worker that's enabled by default and switch to mpm_event:

$sudo a2dismod mpm_worker
$sudo a2enmod mpm_event

Now that we have enabled the event module, let's activate some required extra apache modules needed to run our apps like Drupal:

$sudo a2enmod alias rewrite fastcgi expires headers remoteip ssl actions

We need to create a config file for PHP-FPM so apache is aware of how to treat it:

$sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf-available/php-fpm.conf
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Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Quick install Composer library manager on Ubuntu 16.04 to handle Drupal 8 libraries.

First, get Composer:

$cd ~
$sudo apt-get install curl
$sudo curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

make Composer available globally:

$sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

and you are done! You should get a similar output as in the next screenshot:

composer installed
Thursday, December 15, 2016

This is a super quick guide to add certificate files to a Pound proxy, very useful when using it in environments with Varnish servers. This configuration was tested on Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 16.04

Follow the next steps that I took as sample from this site to configure Pound with a self-signed certificate, make sure to run all commands as root:

$ sudo su

Pound HTTPS Configuration

The following steps will guide you through the generation of a self-signed certificate for your test project server.

During the process you will create:
- server.key: This is a 1024 bit random string ("private key") that uniquely identifies your server.
- server.csr: This is a "Certificate Signing Request" file. You can…

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Friday, June 17, 2016

Run a script when the system starts up or reboots on Ubuntu.

1) Create script, on this example I'm starting the gluu-server service as the root user

$sudo nano /etc/init.d/MyScriptName

Copy/paste the following script, update accordingly:

#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/MyScriptName
#

case "$1" in
  start)
    echo "Attempting to Start Gluu Server..."
    sudo -H -b service gluu-server start
    ;;
  stop)
    echo "Attempting to Stop Gluu Server..."
    sudo -H service gluu-server stop
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/MyScriptName {start|stop}"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0

2) Give the script executable permission

$sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/MyScriptName

3) Tell script to run at startup. This tells the script be the first to shutdown and the last to…

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Monday, July 13, 2015

Angular JS is one of the most popular and robust Frameworks available today to build SPA, Single Page Apps.

Here's a quick tutorial on how to quick install it on Ubuntu 14.04.

Get the latest nodejs and npm packages:

$sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
$sudo apt-get update

Install node.js and its package manager npm:

$sudo apt-get install nodejs

Now, let's install Yeoman angular generator, which is a nice angular project generator, it will handle you project packages, as well as create the initial project structure, folders etc.
Visit the project page for more reference and documentation: https://github.com/yeoman/generator-angular

$sudo npm install -g…
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Sunday, February 22, 2015

On this tutorial I will show you how to configure Varnish as a proxy server so you can re route you requests to any Apache or Nginx Server. 
Configuring Varnish on Ubuntu on distributed Servers is not a complex task, we just need to download some packages and then we will have to copy/paste the configurations below in order to start. Feel free to modify the provided configurations according to your needs. This post assumes there is another server Apache/Nginx listening on port 80 and running a Drupal site. 
Ok, Let's begin.

Install Varnish 3.0.5 from Ubuntu 14.04 repositories:

$sudo apt-get install varnish

Configure varnish deamon:

$sudo nano /etc/default/varnish


DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80,:…
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Tuesday, January 20, 2015