PaaSing Your Code Around

PaaSing

Your
Code Around

EMAIL:
CHRIS@CTANKERSLEY.COM

TWITTER: @
DRAGONMANTANK


1

Who Am I?


Chris
Tankersley


Been Doing PHP for 9+ Years


Lots of projects no one uses,
and a few that some do:


https://github.com/dragonman
tank

2

What is
PaaS
?

3






Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software Package

Platform as a Service





Platform as a Service (
PaaS
)

Server Language

Deployment Scripts




Infrastructure as a Service (
IaaS
)

Server Infrastructure

Storage

Network

4

Why use a
PaaS
?


Offload the work to someone else


Possibly (maybe) more cost effective


Small shops don’t have to hire as many people


Scalability, both up and down

5

PaaS

Workflow

Git

repo

Feature Branch

Feature Branch

Feature Branch

Run
Paas

Deployment

Your App Runs!

6

Basic Knowledge


Just about all of them use
git


Just about all of them work best with a command
line


Your OS doesn’t matter, they all pretty much
support everything


A server
-
side scripting language


Bash, Ruby, Python

7

Other Considerations


Where will uploaded files live?


Does my app scale across multiple servers?


How well does my application perform?


Can I automate everything?


8

9

Let’s set up a site on a
PaaS


https://github.com/dragonmantank/paasing
-
your
-
code
-
around

10

What I built


Silex

App that displayed user
-
supplied ‘texts’ from
drunk elephants


Silex


Symfony

Forms


Ruckusing

Migrations


Twig


11

What did I want to find
out?


How much code I had to change to get it to work


How much of a pain was it to get the deployment
process set up


How long the deployments took


How easy the deployments were


How easy things were to manage

12

What I did


Created the basic app in vagrant


Signed up for a
PaaS


Heroku


Engineyard


Redhat

OpenShift


Amazon
ElasticBeanstalk


Made the app work


Each set of code is in
paas
/[service]


You can fork the repo, checkout the branch, and
set up the
config

13

Heroku

14

Heroku


Heroku

is a container
-
based
PaaS


Each container (
dyno
) is a little virtualized
environment


“Supports” PHP 5.3.27 and Apache 2.2.25 out of
the box


Has a command line interface for working with
your apps

15

Heroku

–

Creating an
Application

16

Heroku

–

Deploying an
App


Push your branch to
Heroku’s

master branch

17

Heroku

–

Getting it to
Work


Heroku

will only detect a PHP app if there is an
index.php

file in the root


Docroot

is automatically set to the root of your
repo


PHP is supported via a partnership with Facebook,
not that you’ll find that on their site


Had to add a custom
Procfile
, bootstrap files, and
Buildpack


Composer is
slooooooow
. Sites took 2
-
15 minutes
to bootstrap


Deploy hooks are done via the
Procfile

18

Heroku

–

General Notes


Extension support is hit or miss. You might need to
compile your own


Since
buildpacks

actually set up an entire
environment, really study what
buildpack

you use


Might want to commit vendor/ to your deploy
branch to speed things up


While PHP 5.3.27 is the base install, you can
actually install any PHP via a
buildpack


Heroku

uses ephemeral storage, so make sure all
your files are saved to something like S3

19

Engineyard

20

Engineyard


Engineyard

is an AWS
-
based
PaaS


You set up Environments, which are groups of
EC2 instances


Supports PHP 5.4.17 and MySQL 5.5 out of the box


Has a command line interface for working with
your apps


Works with your VCS host to pull down and deploy
code

21

Engineyard

–

Creating an
Application


Create a new application


Select the Language


Give it a Repo to pull from


Give it a Name


Tell it the
docroot


Add your deploy key to your
git

server


Set up an Environment


Give it a name


Give it a type (Production, Development,
etc
)


Select a DB


Set up SSH keys

22

Engineyard

–

Deploying
an App


Give it a branch name and click ‘Deploy’

23

Engineyard

–

Getting it to
Work


Had to add a deploy/ script to get the database
migrations to work


24

Engineyard

–

General
Notes


You need to set up SSH keys to get into the boxes


DB credentials are in
/data/[
app_name
]/shared/
config
/
databases.yml


They are also exposed through the $_SERVER array


When you stop an instance without a public IP,
the IPs will change


Since it’s booting an EC2 instance, it’s slow. Takes
10
-
15 minutes to provision the environment
(Deploys are much quicker)


Natively supports Composer!

25

Redhat

OpenShift

26

OpenShift


OpenShift

is a ‘cartridge’ (container)
PaaS


Supports PHP 5.3.17 and MySQL 5.1 when using
the
Zend

Server cartridge


Has a command line interface for working with
your apps


The largest offering of platforms out of the test
PaaS’s

27

OpenShift

–

Creating an
Application

28

OpenShift

–

Deploying an
App


Push your branch to
OpenShift’s

master branch

29

OpenShift
–

Getting it to
Work


Had to fetch and merge their master branch


Docroot

is
php
/, so our deploy script changes that


php
-
intl

extension had too old of an ICU version,
so had to downgrade it through Composer


Could have completely redone PHP, like in
Heroku


Composer is not natively supported, so do it via
the deploy script


Deploy script is bash, so fairly easy to work with


30

OpenShift

–

General Notes


You need to set up SSH keys to get into the boxes


Cartridge system is interesting and works well


Does offer persistent storage, in the
$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR

31

AWS
ElasticBeanstalk

32

ElasticBeanStalk


It’s a Rackspace
-
based
PaaS
!

33

ElasticBeanStalk


It’s a Rackspace
-
based
PaaS
!


It’s an AWS
-
based
PaaS


Supports PHP 5.4 out of the box, and Amazon RDS
for DB


Has a nice command line interface



34

ElasticBeanstalk

–

Creating an Application


Log in AWS and go to
ElasticBeanstalk


Create an Application through their ‘
eb
’ tool


Go to your repo


Run ‘
eb

init
’ and answer the questions

35

ElasticBeanstalk

–

Deploying an App


Run ‘
eb

branch’ to assign your branch to an
environment


Run ‘
git

aws.push
’ to deploy

36

ElasticBeanstalk

–

Getting
it to Work


Had to run ‘
eb

init
’ and run through their setup,
even though the environment existed


Had to run ‘
eb

branch’ to assign the current
branch to an environment so that ‘
git

aws.push
’
would work


37

ElasticBeanstalk

–

General
Notes


It’s AWS, so provisioning the servers can take 10
-
15
minutes


Supports Composer out of the box, which is nice


Deploy hooks are done via their
container_commands

38

So What did I Learn?

39

Deploy Scripts Are Your
Friend


While you’ve got shell access, you still don’t want
to do stuff manually


Knowing Bash scripting was incredibly helpful

40

Understand Your Type of
PaaS


Usually either container
-
based


OpenShift


Heroku


Or Server
-
based


ElasticBeanstalk


Engineyard



These work internally differently, so understand
how each works makes your life easier

41

Your Code Should Just
Work


A good
PaaS

won’t need you to modify your
code


My code modifications were changing DB
-
backends

or making assumptions I shouldn’t have


Most of the differences in the sample code are
deploy scripts and the
config

file


That’s ignoring storage issues, which you might
need to work on

42

Questions?

43

Thank You!


chris@ctankersley.com


@
dragonmantank


https://joind.in/9070

44