So where am I going?

Well, my fiancée and I will be starting, on the 3rd of January, a new company called Bairwell Web Development to combine our two talents. Bairwell will be offering WordPress, Perch and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5 : also some Varnish, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Perl and Systems administration) development consultancy services – so if you want a well designed (Katy), scalable and responsive (me) website: then please get in touch with us via our web development site (Katy is still working on it at this time of writing), Twitter or Facebook.

Fingers crossed!

(Disk spaces on Github are “soft-limits”)
All packages include unlimited public projects.

So, what alternatives are there?

BitBucket

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Unlimited	$80/month	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
50 users	$40/month	Unlimited	50	Unlimited
25 users	$20/month	Unlimited	25	Unlimited
10 users	$10/month	Unlimited	10	Unlimited
5 users	Free	Unlimited	5	Unlimited

Codebase HQ

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Enormous	£95/month	Unlimited (140 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	25Gb
Large	£40/month ~$60/month	Unlimited (60 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	10Gb
Medium	£21/month ~$30/month	Unlimited (30 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	4Gb
Small	£13/month ~$20/month	Unlimited (15 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	2Gb
Tiny	£5/month ~$7/month	Unlimited (3 active projects – unlimited archived)	2	50Mbb
Free	£0	Unlimited (1 active project – unlimited archived)	10	0.5Gb

All packages, apart from “Free”, include wikis and time tracking. All packages apart from “Free” and “Tiny” include “own branding” and “data export”

Indefero

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Going solo	£19/year	25	Unlimited	150MB
Business	£49/year	Unlimited	Unlimited	1Gb
Enterprise	£199/year	Unlimited	Unlimited	5Gb

All packages include issue tracking, file sharing, documenation wiki, code reviews, daily dumps, umlimited public projects.

Any others that I’ve missed?

Here’s my recommendations of products which are available to people in the UK:

JetBrain’s PhpStorm editor
50% off Personal Licences. £38 instead of £77.

OS: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
I’ve found phpStorm a lot better than Eclipse and Netbeans: and as well as PHP, HTML, Javascript syntax colouring and checking, it also does .htaccess files, YAML, XML and more (along with integration with GIT and others). Jetbrains also has the discount on WebStorm (same as PHPStorm, but no PHP editing) and RubyMine.

1Password password manager
About half price. $24.99 for a single user licence instead of $49.99

OS: Windows, Mac OS, iOS (iPhone/iPad)
Stores and manages your passwords and secure notes. Extremely useful and handy. Compatible with Dropbox, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer: so you can have all your passwords on all your computers.

Apple
Discounts from all the range (£31 off the iPad 2, £81 off a MacBook Air)

Prag Prog (Pragmatic Bookshelf)
40% off all items

Offering 40% off all of their products when the coupon code “turkey” is used. Quite a selection of books, but I’ve not tried them before…

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Pro
Save $20

OS: Windows
Buy the popular anti virus and anti spyware application for $9.95 instead of $29.95. I’ve found their free Ad-Aware application extremely good.

Any other tech deals available today to people in the UK that you know of?

Relaunching the Amazon EC2 image

1. Log into your Amazon Ec2 account
2. Select your Region again
3. Select “Images->AMI”
4. Select your image and click “Launch”
5. Ensure the number of instances of “1″ and “Instance type” is “Micro” and click “Continue”

Make a backup of the Amazon EC2 configuration

1. Log into your Amazon Ec2 account
2. Under the “My instances” select your Jenkins install
3. Under “Instance Actions” to “Create Image (EBS AMI)” and give it an appropriate name and description

It is advisable to shutdown your EC2 image when you are not using it to avoid billing (not so important with the free Micro instance, but a good practice to get into)

Continued in Relaunching the Amazon EC2 image

Installing and Configuring Jenkins CI

1. Connect to your Amazon EC2 image as per Connecting to Amazon EC2 using PuTTY
2. In the SSH window, run: sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jenkins.repo http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins.repo
3. In the SSH window, run: sudo rpm --import http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins-ci.org.key
4. In the SSH window, run: sudo yum install jenkins
5. In the SSH window, run: sudo service jenkins start
6. Whilst we are waiting for Jenkins to start up, we can install PHP and associated modules
7. In the SSH window, run: sudo yum install php git
8. In the SSH window, run: wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar;sudo php go-pear.phar
9. You will be prompted if you want to make any changes to the PEAR installation. Select to change the “Installation base ($prefix)” 1 to /usr
10. You will be prompted if “Would you like to alter /etc/php.ini”, select “Yes”
11. In the SSH window, run: sudo pear config-set auto_discover 1

sudo yum install php-devel gcc make ImageMagick ImageMagick-devel php-dom php-pdo dbus-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel ant php-mbstring swig

12. In the SSH window, run: sudo pecl install xdebug channel://pecl.php.net/dbus-0.1.1
13. In the SSH window, run: sudo pear install pear/XML_RPC2 pear.phpqatools.org/phpqatools PHPDocumentor pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit channel://pear.php.net/Text_Highlighter-0.7.1 channel://pear.phpundercontrol.org/phpUnderControl-0.6.1beta1 channel://pear.php.net/HTTP_Request2-2.0.0RC2 channel://pear.php.net/Net_URL2-0.3.1 pear.pdepend.org/PHP_Depend phpunit/PHP_CodeBrowser channel://pear.docblox-project.org/docblox-0.15.1
14. In the SSH window, run: sudo su
15. In the SSH window, run: echo 'zend_extension="/usr/lib64/php/modules/xdebug.so"' >> /etc/php.ini
16. In the SSH window, run: echo 'extension=dbus.so' >> /etc/php.ini
17. In the SSH window, run: echo 'date.timezone="Etc/UTC"' >> /etc/php.ini
18. In your web browser, go to http://ec1-23-456-78-901.xx-yyyy-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8080 (where http://ec1-23-456-78-901.xx-yyyy-1.compute.amazonaws.com is the hostname of your Amazon EC2 image)
19. Click "Manage Jenkins" on the left hand side and then select "Configure system" (in Chrome, you may get the "LOADING..." grey screen covering most things for a long time, just try a different browser)
20. Select "Enable security"
21. Under "Access Control->Security Realm" select "Jenkins's own user database" and tick the "Allow users to sign up"
22. Under "Authorization" select "Matrix based security"
    • Along side "Anonymous" select "Overall->Read"
    • In "User/group to add" add your preferred username and click "Add"
    • Give yourselves full access by checking the entire row
23. Scroll down and click "Save"
24. From the home page of Jenkins click "Sign-up now"
25. Enter the same username as you did before and your preferred password, name and email address. Click "Sign up"
26. Once you've logged back in, select "Manage Jenkins" and "Manage Plugins"
27. Select "Available" and check the following plugins:
    • Checkstyle
    • Clover PHP
    • DRY,
    • JDepend
    • Plot
    • PMD
    • Violations
    • Analysis Collector Plugin
    • xUnit

    If you are developing using GitHub, also select "Github Plugin"

28. Scroll down and click "Install"
29. Wait and then select "Restart Jenkins when no jobs are running"
30. Wait whilst Jenkins restarts
31. Go back to "Manage Jenkins->Configure System"
32. Scroll down to "Ant" and "Add Ant" and call it "Ant" and select "Install automatically"
33. Under the "E-mail notification" under the "Default user e-mail suffix" and "@" followed by your domain name and your email address under "System admin e-mail address"
34. Click Save

Continued in Make a backup of the Amazon EC2 configuration





]]> http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/31/installing-and-configuring-jenkins/feed/ 0 http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/31/installing-and-configuring-jenkins/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RichysRandomRamblings/~3/7qio46nmLlc/ http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/30/connecting-to-amazon-ec2-using-putty/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:00:36 +0000 Richy C. http://blog.rac.me.uk/?p=1783 Continued from Preparing PuTTY for Amazon EC2

Connecting to Amazon EC2 using PuTTY

1. Load PuTTY
2. In the Hostname box, enter the Public DNS entry of your Amazon EC2 instance (ec1-23-456-78-901.xx-yyyy-1.compute.amazonaws.com)
3. Click, in the left hand side of the PuTTY window, Connection->SSH->Auth
4. In the “Private Key Field” select the file you saved from “Preparing PuTTY for Amazon EC2“
5. Click “Open”
6. Login as “ec2-user”

Continued in Installing and Configuring Jenkins CI





]]> http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/30/connecting-to-amazon-ec2-using-putty/feed/ 0 http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/30/connecting-to-amazon-ec2-using-putty/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RichysRandomRamblings/~3/5ePld_93-6k/ http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/29/preparing-putty-for-ec2/#comments Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:00:24 +0000 Richy C. http://blog.rac.me.uk/?p=1777 Continued from Signing up to Amazon EC2 and starting your first image

Preparing PuTTY
Note: These instructions are based on the Windows version of PuTTY and PuTTYgen

1. Download an install PuTTY and PuTTYgen from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ (if there is an “install all” install for your platform, use that)
2. Load PuTTYgen
3. Click Load (“Load an existing private key file”)
4. Select “Show all files (*.*)” in the “Load” box instead of the “PuTTY Private Key Files (*.ppk)”
5. Select your Amazon EC2 Key (such as AmazonInstance.pem)
6. Click Load
7. You should receive the “Succesfully imported foreign key” message
8. Click “Save private key” (select Yes to “Are you sure you want to save this key without a passphrase to protect it?”)
9. Save the file somewhere save

Continued in Connecting to Amazon EC2 using PuTTY





]]> http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/29/preparing-putty-for-ec2/feed/ 0 http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/29/preparing-putty-for-ec2/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RichysRandomRamblings/~3/SKE2PD5Qgqw/ http://blog.rac.me.uk/2011/10/28/signing-up-to-amazon-ec2/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:30 +0000 Richy C. http://blog.rac.me.uk/?p=1775 Continued from Part 1 – Introduction

Signing up to Amazon EC2 and starting your first image

1. Sign up to Amazon’s AWS service at http://aws.amazon.com
2. You will be prompted for payment details, but you won’t be charged if you use Amazon’s free Micro EC2 instance
3. Wait for your account to be created – you will get an email once done, but it’ll take a few hours (it took me 3 hours)
4. Log back into http://aws.amazon.com and select “Amazon EC2″
5. Select the closest region to yourself in the left hand side
6. Select “Launch instance” and, if prompted, select “Launch classic wizard”
7. Select, from the Quck Start tab, the “Basic 64 Bit Amazon Linux AMI” image. This should be near the top and indicated with a big gold star to indicate “Free tier eligible if used with a micro instance”. Click continue
8. Set the number of instances to 1 and the Instance type to “Micro”.
9. Under “Launch instances”, select an EC2 availability zone or just leave it set to “No preference”. Click continue.
10. Ignore the “Advanced instance options” and just click continue
11. Ignore the Tags page and just click continue
12. Select “Create a new Key Pair” and give it a name (such as AmazonInstance) and then “Create and download your key pair” and save the file some where important. Click continue.
13. On the “Create a new security group”, create a name group called “JenkinsSSH” with a description of “Web and SSH access” and:
    • Create a new inbound rule with “Custom TCP rule”, port range “8080″, Source “0.0.0.0/0″. Click Add rule
    • Create a new inbound rule with “Custom TCP rule”, port range “22″, Source “0.0.0.0/0″. Click Add rule
    • Click “Launch” and wait a couple of minutes
    • Once it has launched, scroll down the bottom half of the “My Instances” panel until you see the “Public DNS” and make a record of that entry (ec1-23-456-78-901.xx-yyyy-1.compute.amazonaws.com)

Continued in Preparing PuTTY for Amazon EC2





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