BitNami serves ready-to-roll CMS stacks

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Author: Mayank Sharma

Open source content management systems (CMS) come in various shapes and sizes and can manage everything from your blog to your enterprise. These systems aren’t difficult to deploy, but if you don’t know your Apache from your MySQL, you’ll run into a steep learning curve. If you have a deadline staring at you, or just want to get a CMS up and running as fast as possible, hop over to BitNami, a site that packages ready-to-consume “stacks” of popular open source CMSes. Just grab your favorite one, double-click, and you’re done!

BitNami stacks are available for popular CMSes such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, and MediaWiki. In addition to the CMS itself, the stacks pack the other building blocks of a complete Web server. For example, a WordPress stack will not only have WordPress but also the MySQL database to manage data, Apache Web server to serve the pages, and phpMyAdmin to administer MySQL.

Since it has so much baggage, a BitNami stack is a lot bigger in size than a solo CMS. WordPress alone takes up less than 5MB uncompressed, while the WordPress stack is about 54MB. Stacks are available for Linux, Windows, and x86 and PPC Macs, though not all stacks are available for all platforms.

Where BitNami is going

Daniel Lopez, Founder and CTO of BitRock, the company behind BitNami and the cross-platform installer of the same name, explains his plans with the project.

Linux.com: What’s your objective with BitNami?

Daniel Lopez: Our goal is to grow it into a community, mainly for people who are not familiar with open source or want to try it, but do not have the technical expertise. We are taking it step by step, as our resources are limited. Our first goal is to just get the stacks out there and people using them, and giving feedback. As time permits, we will be adding new collaboration tools in addition to the current forum.

LC: The apps in their original form are pretty small. Why are the stacks so huge? What’s in them?

DL: The stacks include everything that is necessary to get the software up and running, so the user just needs to download the installer, double-click on it, and be done in a few minutes. This increases the size of the download but saves a lot of time. For example, for a PHP stack, it will include a precompiled Apache, MySQL, and PHP plus required extensions.

LC: Isn’t your LAMP stack similar to XAMPP? Does yours have any special powers?

DL: Yes, it is similar in many aspects. They [XAMPP] have been around longer than anybody else, and it is quite popular. If I had to point a difference, I would say that we also provide a RubyStack, while they are mostly focused on PHP/Perl.

LC: How do you plan to generate revenue with the free stacks, assuming the stacks will always be available for free?

DL: Yes, of course, the stacks will always be available for free. If we build a commercial model around it, it will likely be around support and services — for example, if an organization requires a customized version of a stack or wants to package their software along with the stack. But commercializing the stacks is not our focus; we already have a successful business with BitRock. If a business emerges out of it, great, but we are not going to do that if the cost is alienating the community.

LC: Since the stacks are .bin executables, is there a way to find out how you bind the various components together?

DL: There is nothing particularly magic about what we do. We just automate the same steps that a user would do by hand. These mostly involve substituting values in configuration files, running SQL scripts, etc. So, anybody can download the source code for the components, compile them, edit the configuration files, and arrive at the exact same stack that we are providing. But that would pretty much defeat the purpose of the stack, which is to free the end-user from having to perform all those steps. Think of BitNami more as a packager than anything else.

The BitNami stacks have a .bin extension, and once downloaded have a similar installation procedure. First, make the stacks executable with chmod 755 foo-bar-stack.bin, then run it with ./foo-bar-stack.bin. By default the stacks launch a graphical installer. If you are installing the stack on a remote server, you can also run the installer in text mode with ./foo-bar-stack.bin --mode text.

The installer first prompts you to select the components you want to install in addition to the CMS itself. Next you need to select the folder the stack will install into. Then the installer will prompt you to create an admin username and password for the CMS. Next you get to tweak some CMS variables, such as the blog name if you’re installing the WordPress stack. You’ll also have to choose a hostname, which is then used to create internal URLs. By default it uses the localhost address, 127.0.0.1. Finally, choose a password for phpMyAdmin’s administrator user, and you’re good to go.

After installation you can manage stacks with the ctlscript file inside their respective installation directories. ./ctlscript start will start the various services and the CMS and ./ctlscript stop will stop them. If you’ve used 127.0.0.1 as the hostname, you can access the CMS at http://127.0.0.1:8080, where 8080 is the default Apache port.

What if you want to run multiple CMSes? If you have already installed a CMS and it’s running, when you install another one, the stack installer will prompt you to choose a different Apache and MySQL port. So you can have WordPress running on http://127.0.0.1:8080 and Drupal on http://127.0.0.1:8081. The MySQL port (default is 3306) isn’t part of the URL, but is used internally by the CMS to store and retrieve data from the database.

In addition to these stacks for the various CMS applications, BitNami also releases some infrastructure stacks that bundle the building blocks of a Web server without a CMS, and are useful for testing or deploying your own Web apps. There’s a RubyStack (Ruby, Rails, MySQL, Subversion) for Linux and Windows, and the LAMP, WAMP, and MAMP stacks (Apache, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin) for Linux, Windows, and Mac, respectively.

But there’s a drawback to these stacks as well. Suppose you have to run multiple stacks on a single machine — for example, WordPress and Drupal. In a traditional Web server setup, both WordPress and Drupal will share the common Web server resources — Apache, MySQL, PHP. Currently, resource-sharing isn’t possible with BitNami stacks. Each BitNami CMS will use its own separate resources. Furthermore, if you wish to run multiple CMS together, you must make sure the installed CMSes are all running before installing the new one. So if you’ve installed WordPress on 8080 and 3306, and you want to run Drupal on 8081 and 3307, make sure WordPress is running before installing Drupal, or else the Drupal stack will assume that the default Apache and MySQL ports are free and install Drupal at 8080 and 3306 without prompting. If that happens, you can only run either WordPress or Drupal but not both at the same time.

Overall, BitNami stacks are an easy means to getting a CMS up and running. The project currently has more than 15 stacks for apps that run blogs, forums, polls, and wikis, track bugs, and even manage content in an enterprise. If all you need is a ready-to-use Web development environment, BitNami also has stacks that bundle MySQL, Apache, PHP, Ruby, and Rails.

The BitNami stacks are time-saving aces up your sleeve that can come in handy in those moments when deadlines mean everything.

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  • Internet & WWW

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