Run Your Own Comic

Mechanical frogs, for repeatable
 installations of Amphibian.com

As you may have heard, the East Coast got hit by a major snow storm this weekend. It started snowing Friday night and snowed most of the day Saturday. Since I couldn't go anywhere I was able to get a lot done - making some new comics and enhancing the platformer game that I've been working on.

But before I did any of that, I finished checking in files and instructions for repeatable installations of the Amphibian.com webcomic application. I started doing this over a year ago, but never finished it. The goal was to have all of the files and complete keystroke-level instructions necessary to set up Amphibian.com on a new Ubuntu instance.

Why do I want this? Currently, the comic is running on an Ubuntu virtual machine hosted by Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is great and I hope they're around for a long time, but what if they aren't? Or what if another service comes along for a better price? Or what if I just want to set up another instance somewhere for test purposes?

The complete installation includes:

• MySQL server
• Nginx
• Node
• The comic application
• tables created in MySQL
• site configured in Nginx
• PhantomJS

I sat down in the morning with VirtualBox, the Ubuntu 14.04.3 server ISO image, and got to work. I created a fresh virtual machine with a clean install of Ubuntu and documented all the steps I had to perform to get the comic running. When I thought I had all the commands documented, I started from scratch with a new virtual machine and did it all again by just copying and pasting commands. Of course, I missed a few. I updated my document and tried again with a third virtual machine. That time, everything went well and I had Amphibian.com running in under 10 minutes.

The things that I was really missing were database setup scripts (to make the database, user, and tables), the site configuration files for Nginx, and a script to start and stop the application. I added those to the repository along with my complete setup instructions and now I feel a lot better. Not only does it allow me to have the confidence that I can recreate my application if I ever need to, but it allows other people to easily set up and run my application as well. Maybe you'd like to try it, and make your own comic?

Here is the link directly to the INSTALL.txt file in the repo on GitHub, so you can check it out.

What's next? Maybe complete automation of the setup using something like Puppet. That way I could take advantage of an auto-scaling service like AWS offers, so when my comic gets insanely popular I won't have to worry about long response times. It could happen.

---

As a side note, I found out while I was doing this that a new major version of PhantomJS was recently released. This 2.0.0 has some major differences and actually fixes some bugs that I've encountered while using it to generate the static images of my comics. Unfortunately, there is no binary distribution available for Linux yet - so my installation instructions for Amphibian.com actually include building PhantomJS 2.0.0 from source. That takes a long time, so I'm keeping my binary around in case I need it again before the official ones are available. If you would like it (built for Ubuntu 14.04.3 64-bit) just let me know and I'll give you a link.

---

If you're done setting up your own copy of Amphibian.com now, click the picture below and view my Amphibian.com comic for today!

Amphibian.com comic for 25 January 2016