Hi all, I am just wondering how to create a custom image that I can share in public with the following things pre-installed.
My use case is that to create an e-commerce site with Woocommerce and an app with Appmaker.xyz .
So that whoever need to setup an e-commerce website and an App with simple steps
You can create a snapshot and send it to users who need it. That’s not enough public.
The thing you probably want is User Data - Cloud-Init scripts.
How To Use Cloud-Config For Your Initial Server Setup.
An Introduction to Cloud-Config Scripting.
DigitalOcean User Scripts Library.
For further questions feel free to ask.
@xMudrii Thanks for your quick response, I was looking to make it even easier for users. It will be great if users can add custom images. And other can use it easily
You can send your idea to DigitalOcean via their UserVoice page.
I found out that it was already suggested but it didn’t receive positive feedback. Custom One-Click Image is idea you’re looking for.
But yea, problem stated there is that you can’t know is image malicious or not. You can build up image and ship with virus or some type of backdoor. That’s a big problem and I think it’s better without it.
Cloud-Init script makes it easy. You see what you execute on your sever, in plain text format and it’s pretty easy to understand it. Also, it’s easy to share it - GitHub, GitHub Gist, whatever you want.
Thanks for UserVoice,
I understand that. It will be great if we can do that like a Dockerfile
Hey @saleeh I’d suggest introducing configuration management to achieve this. Try out packer.io . It’s basically a “tool for creating machine images with pre-configured operating systems and installed software from a single source configuration”. DigitalOcean has a great tutorial on setting it up: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-get-started-with-packer-on-an-ubuntu-12-04-vps
When you get into it, packer has more provisioners other than shell for installing and configuring software. Go through the tutorial first to get what I’m talking about here. For example see how I use this ansible provisioner to install software on the machine:
{
"builders": [{
"type": "digitalocean",
"api_token": "YOUR API TOKEN",
"region": "nyc3",
"size": "512mb",
"image": "ubuntu-14-04-x64"
}],
"provisioners": [{
"type": "ansible",
"playbook_file": "standard.yml"
]
}]
}
It references an ansible playbook: standard.yml which goes through a list of system packages to install that are listed in the vars.yml file.
standard.yml
---
- hosts: all
vars_files:
- vars.yml
tasks:
- name: Installs required system packages listed in the vars.yml file
apt: pkg={{ item }} state=installed update_cache=true
with_items: "{{ system_packages }}"
vars.yml
---
system_packages:
- apache2
- git
- mysql-server
- php5-mysql
- php5
- libapache2-mod-php5
- php5-mcrypt
- unzip
- zip
command:
- mysql_install_db
- mysql_secure_installation
Now all you need to do is share this configuration file that anyone can run to create an image on DigitalOcean with your custom setup. Please share if you do :)