We are happy to announce we just released support for Amazon Linux on BitNami Cloud Hosting! Amazon Linux is a distribution of Linux optimized for the Amazon Cloud that is binary compatible with RHEL and CentOS. As with the RHEL support in BitNami Cloud Hosting, we use the native Amazon Linux Stack for deploying the BitNami applications. This means that they are installed on top of the MySQL, Apache, and other components that come bundled with the operating system, allowing you to make use of the OS tools to keep your server up to date.

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2. It also includes several packages that enable easy integration with AWS, including launch configuration tools and many popular AWS libraries and tools. Amazon Web Services also provides ongoing security and maintenance updates to all instances running the Amazon Linux AMI. Updates are provided via a pre-configured yum repository hosted in each Amazon EC2 region. Security updates are automatically applied on the initial boot of the AMI. Upon login, the Message of the Day (/etc/motd) indicates whether or not any additional updates are available.

The Amazon Linux AMI is now available at no additional charge in BitNami Cloud Hosting. For more information on Amazon Linux, please visit the Amazon Linux AMI page.

Sign up for free today to run your favorite open source applications on Amazon Linux in the cloud with BitNami Cloud Hosting!

Today, HP's new public cloud offering, HP Cloud Services, was released into public beta. We are very happy to announce that we have made two of the BitNami "bundle" Stacks available on HP Cloud Services: DevPack and WebPack.

BitNami DevPack provides an instant deployment environment for some of the most popular web development runtimes and servers, including PHP, Django, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, MySQL, PostgreSQL and dozens of others. Everything you need to get started developing and hosting your own applications on HP Cloud Services.

BitNami WebPack includes ready to run versions of three of the most popular open source blog and CMS engines: WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!. It will allow you to deploy fully featured websites in minutes which you can later customize with thousands of plugins and addons available for these platforms.

Both of these BitNami images are available now on HP Cloud Services (you will see them in the default set of images you can choose from.) To learn more about the images and running them on HP Cloud Services, check the BitNami wiki.We plan on bringing more of the BitNami Application Library to HP Cloud Services over time. 
HP is currently offering 50% discounts on its service during the public beta, so give it a try!

We are happy to announce that we added support for RVM in BitNami RubyStack for OS X and Linux. RubyStack is a popular all-in-one package for everything that you need to get started with Ruby development in general and Rails in particular. It includes Apache, MySQL, SQLite, ImageMagick, Passenger, etc. RubyStack is free and can be downloaded as native installers, VMWare images or launched as Amazon Machine Images.

This new release of RubyStack includes RVM, a command-line tool which allows you to easily install, manage, and work with multiple Ruby environments from interpreters to sets of gems. This is convenient if you need to maintain multiple projects, dependent on different Ruby versions.

To install different Ruby versions it is necessary to have already installed the main compilation tools. These tools are already included inside our RubyStack Virtual Machines and Amazon Cloud Images. If you are using the native installer, you can check the RVM requirements running the following command:

$ rvm requirements

You can list the installed Ruby versions and use one of them. RubyStack 3.2.3-0 installs and configures Ruby 1.9.3-p194.

$ rvm use system

$ ruby --version
ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-linux]
You can install another Ruby version, for example:

$ rvm install ruby-1.8.7-p358

You can find more info at BitNami RVM wiki and at the official RVM site.

For Windows users, RubyStack now ships DevKit. It is a toolkit that makes it easy to build and use native C/C++ extensions for Ruby on Windows like JSON, Thin and others.

We have released an updated BitNami JRuby Stack. According to the official JRuby site all users are encouraged to upgrade to this new JRuby version:

"This is a special release of JRuby which only updates our shipped copy of RubyGems to version 1.8.24. This version of RubyGems is the first version to verify that a RubyGems server certficate is valid. This helps to prevent a “man in the middle” style of attack when someone controls a portion of the network between you and the RubyGems server. All users are encouraged to upgrade to JRuby 1.6.7.2."
Apart from JRuby, this stack also includes updated Tomcat and Java versions.

If you haven't started with JRuby yet and you want to give it a try, take a look at our Quick Start Guide.

Enjoy!

We have just released an updated BitNami Magento Stack that includes Magento Community 1.7.0.

This new version help merchants provide a more personalized shopping experience for their customers with the following improvements:

• Improved customer segmentation and ordering capabilities.
• Added auto generation of coupon codes
• Added EU VAT ID validation service integration
• Implemented DHL for Europe
• Added the Cash On Delivery and Bank Transfer payment methods

Check the full list of enhancements here.

We have partnered with North Bridge Venture Partners and 37 other leading cloud organizations to sponsor the 2nd annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey. The survey will capture current perceptions, sentiments and future expectations of cloud computing from industry experts, users and vendors of cloud software, support and services. The goal of the survey is to measure how and to what extent the cloud is being used, the key drivers of growth and change in the cloud, and the impact the cloud is having on IT and business operations. The survey will explore areas such as current use, drivers, barriers, and future plans regarding cloud computing. The survey will also reveal profile information on the types of cloud services currently being used.

Please take a moment to share your thoughts on the future of cloud computing. The survey closes June 1st and the results will be published publicly at www.northbridge.com/software around the end of the month. You can also request that the results be sent to you via email when you complete the survey.

Last week, Ubuntu 12.04 was released, and we are happy to report that  our BitNami virtual machine images and cloud templates (AMIs) have been updated to include this latest and greatest release of Ubuntu! Because 12.04 is an LTS, or "Long Term Support" release, this version of Ubuntu will be supported for 5 years, so you can feel confident deploying systems of all types on it.

The BitNami VMs and AMIs make it incredibly easy to check out Ubuntu 12.04 - just fire up a VM in a virtual environment or spin up a cloud instance and you will be good to go. Enjoy!

Last week we announced the first version of our BitNami Jenkins Stack. This week a new Jenkins version was announced and we have already updated our stack. However, in some cases it is more convenient to upgrade the installation in place than re-installing. This post explains briefly how to upgrade a Jenkins installation manually.

The first step is to understand where the JENKINS_HOME variable is pointing to. That directory is where all your data is stored.

In BitNami we define JENKINS_HOME in the apache-tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/jenkins.xml file pointing to apps/jenkins/jenkins_home. If you want to upgrade Jenkins keeping your data, you just need to download the latest jenkins.war file, copy it in your apache-tomcat/webapps directory and restart Tomcat. It is recommended to create a backup of the previous jenkins.war file, just in case you find issues when upgrading.


On Linux and OSX you can execute the following steps to perform the above (notice that the installation directory is /opt/bitnami in the BitNami virtual appliances and BitNami Amazon Images):


$ cd <installation_directory> $ ./ctlscript.sh stop $ cp apache-tomcat/webapps/jenkins.war apps/jenkins/jenkins.war.bak $ wget http://mirrors.jenkins-ci.org/war/latest/jenkins.war $ mv jenkins.war apache-tomcat/webapps/ $ ./ctlscript.sh start


On Windows you can stop the servers from the Start Menu entry or using the graphical tool that you can find in your installation directory. Using the file explorer go to where you installed the BitNami Jenkins Stack. Copy the jenkins.war file from the apache-tomcat/webapps directory to apps/jenkins. Download the latest jenkins.war file and copy it in apache-tomcat/webapps. Now just start the server from the Start Menu or using the graphical tool.

Alternatively to the process above, you can download a new BitNami Jenkins Stack. You can install it to a different location (remember to stop the previous install so there are no port conflicts) and point it to your previous JENKINS_HOME path by editing the file  apache-tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/jenkins.xml.

We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami Drupal Stack. This new version includes support for Drush. Drush is a command line shell tool and scripting interface for Drupal designed to make life easier for people who need to deploy multiple Drupal installations.

Thanks to Drush you can easily manage your Drupal modules, edit configuration settings or backup your sites from the command line.

To get started, you first need to load the right environment. This is done automatically when logging in to a virtual appliance or cloud image. If you installed Drupal on your desktop, you can do so by executing:

/path/to/bitnami-drupal-install-directory/use_drupal

and on Windows by clicking on Start Menu > BitNami Drupal Stack > Use Drupal Stack.

The following are example commands you can run after that:

• Download and install a module, for example Content Construction Kit (CCK ) a popular plugin that allows adding custom fields to nodes using a web browser

          drush pm-download cck
    drush pm-enable cck

• Export the Drupal database as SQL, for backup purposes

    drush sql-dump > drupal_backup.sql

• Or you can backup everything, including your code, files, and database into a single file

    drush archive-dump default --destination=/backups/drupal_site.tar

•  Set a variable, for example the site email address

    drush variable-set site_mail mail@example.com
More information can be found in the official Drush guide. Thanks to OpenMelva for their suggestions and feedback Drush and other aspects of our Drupal stack.