Sriram Natarajan's Weblog: Do more with Web Server

Today, Sun officially released a distribution - OpenSolaris 2008.05 based on a 3 year long open source effort happening with Solaris at  Open Solaris web site. You can catch more on this release from here.

Now, if you are web developer interested in figuring out how it is useful to you, here is what you might like

* Ruby binaries can be downloaded and installed with the single command

   Open a command line terminal window and run the following command

    pfexec pkg install ruby

   Now, you can Ruby specific components by doing some thing like

    pfexec /usr/ruby/1.8/bin/gem install <component name>
 

* MySQL or PHP developers can get their binaries (again from a command line window) by doing some thing like

    pfexec pkg install amp

    The Apache, PHP and MySQL binaries are available under /usr/apache2 , /usr/php5 and /usr/mysql directories respectively.  The corresponding configuration files are found under /etc/apache2 , /etc/mysql and /etc/php5 directories respectively.

* Once you have successfully install MySQL or Apache , you will need to initialize the SMF service.  The following command does the initialization job for you. 

    pfexec /usr/sbin/svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/network/http-apache22.xml

    pfexec /usr/sbin/svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/application/database/mysql.xml

If in case, you wonder what is SMF - you might wanna check out Service Management Facility project page for more information on how this is useful to you. 

* Now, you can start these Apache and MySQL services by doing something like

    pfexec /usr/sbin/svcadm enable network/http:apache22

    pfexec /usr/sbin/svcadm enable database/mysql:version_50 

Similarly, the way to stop these services, if you need to , you would do 

pfexec /usr/sbin/svcadm disable network/http:apache22

pfexec /usr/sbin/svcadm disable database/mysql:version_50 

 * PHP runtime is configured by default within default Apache Service. So, you should be able to deploy PHP applications by simply writing a PHP application within Web Server document root directory - /var/apache2/2.2/htdocs.

That is all you need to do to get your web site up and running. If you want to do Joomla or MediaWiki, you can simply unpack these tar ball within the web server document root directory (/var/apache2/2.2/htdocs) and hit their index page . This is all you need to get them up and running.

Does this sound simple enough for you to try it out ?

Now, if you need to read more information on this , please check out the Getting Starting Guide from here . Kindly, give OpenSolaris 2008.05 a spin and let us as to what you think and how we can improve it