Gitorious/Redis installer updated

In regards to my last post gitorious-and-redis-service I have updated my clone of the ce-installer to include the changes up to v2.4.12 and rolled all my changes from that post into the latest version.

My CE-Installer clone:
 https://www.gitorious.org/~kholloway/gitorious/kholloways-ce-installer

I have requested a merge with the mainline ce-installer which is viewable at:
 https://www.gitorious.org/gitorious/ce-installer/merge_requests/2

Enjoy!

Gitorious and the Redis service

Gitorious has a very nice status command via /usr/bin/gitorious_status that quickly shows you if all your Gitorious services are up and running (see screenshot).

It's missing one very important service though, Redis!

Redis is now the default messaging service when you do a fresh install via the Gitorious CE-Installer but it's not included in the status check, it's missing from the /admin/diagnostics page and it's missing a Monit check file to restart it if it dies. Keeping it running is pretty important for a working Gitorious install because without it many of the web page operations like creating a new project or team will fail and it won't be very clear from the logs why it failed.

Lets fix some of those problems.

First off lets patch the gitorious_status script with the patch below which should work on any modern Linux variant.

Save the lines below as:
 /tmp/my.patch

*** gitorious_status 2013-03-25 16:11:04.475121039 -0500
--- gitorious_status_redis 2013-03-25 16:16:35.380135982 -0500
*************** unicorn_status() {
*** 26,31 ****
--- 26,35 ----
      check_process_and_report "ps -p $PID" "Unicorn"
  }

+ redis_status() {
+     check_process_and_report "/etc/init.d/redis status" "Redis"
+ }
+
  # Upstart's exit codes are a beast of its own
  resque_status() {
      check_process_and_report "/sbin/initctl status resque-worker" "Resque"
*************** sphinx_status
*** 80,82 ****
--- 84,87 ----
  memcached_status
  sshd_status
  mysqld_status
+ redis_status

Apply your patch to the status command:

     patch /usr/bin/gitorious_status < /tmp/my.patch

Your status command should now show the details of the Redis service as shown below.

Next lets create a Monit config file for Redis which will watch the process and restart if needed.
I use Puppet and a custom Monit module I wrote for this but it's not required.
For now lets just manually create the file and you can integrate it into your configuration management tool later if you like. Note that the Monit file below is specific to Redhat, change the pidfile and start/stop lines as needed to match your OS.

Copy the contents below into:
   /etc/monit.d/redis.monit

check process redis-server with pidfile /var/run/redis/redis.pid
  start program = "/sbin/service redis start"
  stop program = "/sbin/service redis stop"
  if does not exist for 1 cycles then restart
  if 5 restarts within 5 cycles then alert

Now lets restart Monit so it picks up the change.
On Redhat that's done like so:
   service monit restart

Check that it's setup correctly in Monit:
    monit summary

OR
    monit status

So now you have Redis monitored by Monit and the gitorious_status command shows you if it's up or down but your /admin/diagnostics page is still missing any status about it. That last bit is not too hard to fix but for now I'm leaving that up to the Gitorious folks to patch along with the incorrect status about the gitorious-poller service which is not in use any longer.

My new RSS setup after the death of Google Reader

My setup for now, so far working very well.

FeedaFever on my server (I love owning my own data!)

Reeder iOS app on the iPhone and I'm hoping the Reeder dev adds FeedaFever support for Reeder on iPad and Mac soon.

Fever has a usable web interface on both iPad and iPhone if you don't have a native app but Reeder is the gold standard on iOS for an RSS reader.

Alternative iPhone app choice for FeedaFever: Sunstroke

Some alternatives I looked at and still might use down the road are NewsBlur and Feedly.

NewsBlur is hosted with free accounts or premium accounts and if you want it's open source so you can download and run your own server.

Feedly looks nice also but I'm not used to the layout/setup yet.

Git CE Installer for RHEL 6.X

My small modifications to the main Gitorious CE installer so it installs cleanly on Redhat/RHEL 6.X instead of just on CentOS 6.X. It also does not try to update Puppet when it's already installed.

I'm maintaining a Git repo of my changes at Gitorious:
  Custom Gitorious CE Installer for RHEL

SVN to Git

SVN -> Git:

 Good post by Makis about how to setup SVN to Git conversions.

Transferring-svn-repository-to-git