This personal website is not very used and even if it was nice to have an AWS server hosting it, it clearly doesn’t require it. So beginning of 2019, I exported all posts from the site and repackage it in a static website, hosted by Github-Pages.

Because I don’t want to code everything myself, I followed github recommendation to use Jekyll, looked for a theme/template I like, and adapted it to add a couple of features and have the desired style (I’m no artist so I keep it simple).

I then retrieved all posts from my wordpress DB, and refactored them as post files for jekyll. In the end, I did it manually (export database, copy-paste and adapt the content into the suitable format). as I don’t have many posts: making a script would have taken much more time.

Here is the result :)

On September 2017, the redhat cloud I used to host my wordpress site changed its structure (and pricing). It didn’t fit my need anymore so I moved my website to AWS, which I used to work with.

Here is a summary of what I had to do:

There are lots of tutorial that explained everything (but for solving some critical problem explained below):

• account creation: signup, create an IAM account and follow all steps (vpc, security group)
• Launch an instance: deploy your first AWS instance. I used the free tier t2.micro with standard EBS volume.
• Connect to instance
• Install the LAMP stack: follow all steps (install pck, start apache+config, secure mysql, …)
  • Here I probably made a mistake when changing the ownership of some directories :-\
• Install WP

It all worked fine, but I later had some trouble. My site wasn’t answering anymore and I couldn’t connect with ssh, timeout. I now think that I must have made an error with the credential. But at the time I didn’t know and, following some advice found on internet, I restarted my instance: I still couldn’t connect, but this time with connection refused…

After looking at the console log of my instance, I found out that ssh didn’t start, due to some incorrect owner rights on some system directories. But how to correct some file-system ownership when I cannot connect to the instance!?!

The solution, in short :

• Shutdown the instance
• Disconnect the EBS volume
• Create a new instance (same config) and connect the EBS of the 1st instance on it
• Start and connect to it.
• Correct the files owner ship on the mounted drive
• Revert the three first steps

In the XData project I had to convert a stand alone Spring web app into a “big-data” web app running on a hadoop cluster. To do that, I chose to use apache spark and spark-hive because it provided the most practical interface. I however could not find any documentation or tutorial on such use of spark in java spring web application.

To test how to setup such application, I made two getting-started prototypes:

1. A spring+spark web app: a minimal web service that reads and converts files either on local file system or on hdfs, using spark.
2. A spring+spark-hive web app: a minimal web service that generate a hive table and requests content from it.

The main difficulty is about run-time dependencies: dependencies used for compilation (such as provided through maven) are not working together at run-time (at the time of writing this post).

To run stand alone app, one should add the $SPARK_HOME/lib/spark-assembly-X.X.X-hadoopY.Y.Y.jar (provided by the spark installation) to the classpath. For the spark-hive case, the datanucleus dependencies found in spark lib should also be added. Because, web app are run by a servlet container, such as tomcat or jetty, this jar should be added:

1. Either to the war file, such as recommended for web app. It is however a 140Mb dep. This is what is used in the spring+spark web app (1).
2. Or to the class path of the servlet container. This is what is used in the spring+spark-hive web app (2) which is added to the maven jetty plugin.

For my (professional) work, I choosed the second solution: add the spark jar to maven jetty plugin which is used during development, and I included the jetty-runner to the project which I run with spark jar added to to classpath (using the –jar option). This entry was posted in big-data, hadoop, java, other, spark, spring, web-service on 16 March 2015 by diener.

I happened to have problem running a jar with dependencies, and I found my-self wondering: Do I really know how it works?

I don’t remember having ever done it manually, so I tried. It is a good thing to be sure of what we know. Here is the code, lets two classes A and B. A’s got the main and requires B:

package one.pack;
 
import two.pack.B;
 
public class A{
    public static void main(String args[]){
        B b = new B();
        b.println("Hello world");
    }
}

package two.pack;
 
public class B{
    public void println(String message){
        System.out.println("B says: "+message);
    }
}

Now, let’s compile everything

# compile B.java into B.jar
javac B.java -d .    # "-d .": automatically create folders two/pack/
jar -cf B.jar two/     
 
# compile A.java into A.jar
javac -cp B.jar A.java -d .   # include B.jar in the classpath
jar -cf A.jar one/

Finally, move A.jar and run it

mv A.jar /somewhere/else
java -cp /somewhere/else/A.jar:B.jar one.pack.A

Output: B says: Hello world

Conclusion, it is just as expected but now at least I’m sure of it :-)

Here is a simple method to deploy a wordpress server on the redhat cloud and attach it to a domain name, for free.

This is what I have done to host this site Not anymore, see this post.

Create a wordpress server:

1. Create an account on OpenShift, or login
2. Add an application, and select “wordpress”
3. If the account was just created, choose its (unique) namespace
4. Choose the application name and fill up the form
5. Go to application-namespace.rhcloud.com site to create the wordpress user account
6. Add content and customize the site directly from wordpress

Access the server:

1. install the rhc command, then run rhc setup
2. log in with ssh and/or git clone the wordpress repo from openshift - The url for ssh and git can be found on the page of the application once logged in openshit.
3. Note for git: content should be added in the .openshift/[themes|plugins|...] folder of the repo. It will be copied in the suitable folder of the wordpress server (i.e. $OPENSHIFT_DATA/[themes|...]) by git push.

Finally, to attach this application to a domain name:

1. Follow this 2 steps procedure
2. Then in wordpress dashboard > setting > general, change the “site address (url)” with the url of your domain
3. Note: to get a free (sub)domain name, check freedns.afraid.org