The AppScale installation procedure is already well documented in the AppScale wiki. Therefore this blog post only serves as a summary and a refresher of the most important steps. The installation of AppScale usually boils down to creating a virtual machine (VM) image for the environment in which you intend to deploy AppScale. For an example, if you wish to deploy AppScale on Amazon EC2, then you need to create an EC2 AMI with AppScale installed on it. If you wish to run AppScale on Eucalyptus, you will be creating a Eucalyptus EMI with AppScale on it. Similarly you can create AppScale VM images for other virtualized environments (eg: Xen, Virtual Box, Fusion etc). The only exception to this is when you want to deploy AppScale without a virtualization layer. In that case you can directly install AppScale on the host operating system.
As of the time of writing, AppScale is only supported on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 Server Edition. This is common to all the target environments. Therefore regardless of the virtualization layer you intend to use, your AppScale VM image must be running Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 Server Edition. However we will start supporting newer versions of Ubuntu pretty soon therefore I'd recommend you to refer the AppScale wiki to find out about the latest OS supported by the system.
Once you have procured your Ubuntu Lucid image you can boot it up and start installing AppScale on it. First login to the VM as root. We will use the command-line Git client to pull the latest AppScale source code on to the VM. But first we need to install the command-line Git client.
apt-get install git-core
Now clone the AppScale and AppScale-Tools repositories to the home directory of root.
git clone https://github.com/AppScale/appscale.git
git clone https://github.com/AppScale/appscale-tools.git
If you want to pull any recent bug fixes or improvements, simply pull the AppScale testing branches. You can do this by adding "--branch testing" flag to the above two commands. Once you have the two repositories checked out, simply change into the appscale directory and run the following command to kick off the build process.
bash debian/appscale_build.sh
AppScale build can take about 20-30 minutes depending on how fast your Internet connection is. Once the AppScale build is complete check for a directory named /etc/appscale. This should contain a subdirectory named after the version of AppScale you just installed and this subdirectory should contain a collection of text files named after different database engines (eg: cassandra, hbase etc). If these files are in place that's a pretty reasonable indication that everything has gone according to the plan. Now change into appscale-tools directory you checked out earlier, and run the same build command as above to start building the AppScale command-line tools. This shouldn't take more than a few seconds.
You are now done installing AppScale on the VM image. You can now go ahead and start bundling/packing the VM image for your target environment. For an example if you're going to run AppScale on EC2, you can start the AMI bundling process now. The actual procedure for bundling and uploading VM images will depend on your target environment.
It is particularly trivial to setup AppScale in the EC2 environment. The EBS technology of Amazon makes it absolutely simple to create AMI images with AppScale. Here's all you have to do:
1. Start a fresh Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 EBS image (eg: ami-1634de7f). If you start this VM as a m1.large instance the whole thing will be over much quicker.
2. Run the above described procedure to checkout and build AppScale on the EC2 instance.
3. Login to your AWS management console. Right click on your EC2 instance and select the "Create Image (EBS AMI)" option from the menu that appears. This will start bundling your AppScale AMI and it will be available for deployment within several minutes.
It is sometimes necessary to create VM images with only the AppScale-Tools. In this case you may only checkout the AppScale-Tools source code and build it. However you will have to install a few additional libraries manually.
apt-get install openjdk-6-jre
apt-get install ruby
apt-get install rubygems
apt-get install ruby1.8-dev
gem install json
This should enable you to run AppScale-Tools on your VM image.
In my next post I'll describe how to start AppScale and deploy applications on the AppScale PaaS.
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