Very Siberian's picture

Hello! I have just returned to TKL after a brief adventure with Bitnami. I just find TKL to be so much easier to configure and use. The problem is that I really need it to run in Google's Cloud Platform instead of Amazon. Has anyone had success in doing so? Any snags or issues with initial launch or maintenance over the long term?

 

TIA,

Rob

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Hi there and welcome back! :)

It would be great to have images for Google Cloud (we've always intended to, just never got there). But unfortunately, I don't even have a clue what would be required?!

Having said that, I did a quick search online and it looks like you can import a VM disk. So perhaps a fairly straight forward way would be to create a local Turnkey VM and migrate that to Google Cloud?

Also, having tried both TurnKey and Bitnami; I'd be interested in anything that stands out that we could do and/or do better (e.g. that Bitnami does that we don't, etc). Obviously Google Cloud support is one thing (which I would really love to do; but no ETA), but I'm sure that there are others.

Very Siberian's picture

Thank you, Jeremy! I will give this a try. In response to your question, two advantages of Bitnami I have experienced are (1) ability to host and run their VMs on AWS, Azure, and GCP, and (2) more frequent updating of their stacks. Of course (and especially now that VMware bought them), they're a much larger company with more resources than TKL. On the other hand, the reason I'm back here is that TKL beats the hell out of Bitnami (at least for the VMs I have used) in terms of ease of use and features available right out of the box. You do an amazing job providing tools and utiliies straight away upon installation, along with support for SSL through Let's Encrypt with automatic renewal. It just works. I have simply hit some limits with TKL WordPress given the pace of updates -- it seems like the world has no patience any longer for older versions of PHP, for example.

 

Best regards,

Rob

Jeremy Davis's picture

The 2 big takeaways I got from your post were; greater hosting choice and newer software, particularly PHP.

As I've hinted, the hosting one is one we are aware of and do hope to address at some point. Having said that, it's not currently a priority, so there's not much more I can add for now.

Having older/stable versions or core software is a big selling point for many of our users. Although I do understand that some software, particularly PHP, has had some major improvements in more recent versions. I'm also well aware of the hurdles faced by developers when trying to maintain multiple versions. Smaller developers have less resources so can only support limited versions.

Having said that, PHP is relatively easy to update because of Ondřej Surý's deb.sury.org. Ondřej is a PHP package maintainer for Debian and Ubuntu, so well trusted in the community. He provides his own repo of newer PHP packages. So if being able to update/change PHP version adds significant value, then perhaps we should include an easy way to do that in LAMP based apps?! If there is other software in particular (other than PHP) then we could also consider that on a case-by-case basis. How does that sound?

Very Siberian's picture

Thank you for your thoughtful reply! Both options sound great. My primary TKL app is WordPress, which has been really pushing PHP updates in the last 2-3 years. There was a major push from PHP 5.6 to 7.0, which I understand, but it has not slowed down. Pretty soon, I predict that we will be getting nagged in our dashboards to update to PHP 8+!

An easy way to update PHP in LAMP based apps would be glorious. More hosting options would also be delicious.

Thank you for your excellent work,

Rob

Very Siberian's picture

Hello again,

It took a large chunk of the weekend, but I got it working on Google Cloud Platform. After a few false starts, the easiest approach ended up being the following.

1. Download the TKL VM (WordPress, in my current usage case). 

2. Import it to VirtualBox, configure it, and launch it.

3. Go through the first boot process (i.e., set passwords, etc.).

4. Shutdown the applicance, then export the updated appliance an as OVA file.

5. Import the OVA to Google Cloud Platform:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/import/import-ovf-files

6. Configure the VM for networking (i.e., allow http and https requests):

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/special-configurations

Of course, having a ready-to-launch TKL appliance would still be beautiful, but for now, the above approach worked for me.

The only thing I cannot presently do is use the tools, such as Adminer and Webmin, which require connection over a specific port. I would appreciate any suggestions for how to access them in a cloud environment. They are local IP addresses, so I'm guessing that I would need to find some way to tunnel into the VM so that I'm on its subnet and able to use a browser to hit the private IP addresses or open ports to make the tools publicly accessible, though the latter seems unwise from a security standpoint.

Best regards,

Rob

Jeremy Davis's picture

Great work and thanks for sharing. No doubt someone else will find this of value.

All in all, that sounds relatively straightforward. Obviously there would be some extra steps for us as we'd need to work out how to get the inithooks to work, but it is heartening to hear that it (hopefully) shouldn't be too hard when we get to it.

As for your question regarding Adminer and Webmin, you'll need to allow those ports (12322 & 12321 respectively - as you likely know). I had a quick search and found the Google Cloud firewall doc page. Having a quick glance through that, it seems like it should be relatively straight forward. Although having said that, I've never personally used Google Cloud, so the specifics around setting up the firewall stuff with the VPC etc, may be a bit of a fiddle.

Solutions's picture

Thanks for posting details, this is somehow useful, but not enough, the reason is that gcloud is not proving enough details about anything in general, then they take you in a loop to make it leave forever.

The simple question, is where to upload the file itself after going through the maze?

 

Thanks,

Very Siberian's picture

@Solutions, sorry, but I'm not sure how to answer your question. If you can describe the choke point in detail, I will try to remember how I addressed it. In all fairness, I ended up moving away from Google Cloud Platform to AWS to take advantage of the TurnKey Hub.

Very Siberian's picture

Thank you again, Jeremy! Creating a firewall rule worked, and I now have access to all the TKL appliance tools that you artfully included in the bundle.

Best regards,

Rob

Jeremy Davis's picture

Glad that worked!

Very Siberian's picture

Yes, so am I! The only problem is that I'm not paying you all anything when I use Google Cloud Platform, so I just donated through your PayPal donation page. If you decide to offer a paid offering in GCP, I will happily use it.

Best regards,

Rob

Jeremy Davis's picture

Thanks for the donation and thanks too for your sentiment.

I really appreciate your desire to contribute and we certainly do hope to get our appliances on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Having said that, we'd rather you use TurnKey (for free) and tell everyone how great we are, than using something else... :) We rely on word of mount (and our fairly good SEO) to attract users. Just having you back using TurnKey is a win in my books!

If you do want to contribute financially, one thing that you could consider is using TKLBAM (via the Hub)?! I know that you don't really want to use AWS and currently we only support AWS S3 storage (so you would still need an AWS account to use that). However, it's host agnostic, so it will work on your Google Cloud server.

Anyway, good luck with it all and take care. As per always, please do not hesitate to post if you have any further feedback, questions, etc.

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