Preparing CentOS for stackd.io installation

The steps below were written using CentOS 7 from a CentOS-provided AMI on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The exact AMI we used is ami-6d1c2007, and you should be able to easily launch an EC2 instance using this AMI from the AWS Marketplace.

Prerequisites

All of the CentOS-provided AMIs have SELinux and iptables enabled. We disabled both of these to be as straight forward as possible during this guide. SELinux causes issues that are beyond the scope of the guide, and we disabled iptables because we leverage EC2’s security groups for firewall access.

iptables

Let’s just turn it off for now. Please note, if you’re using EC2 or some other cloud provider that has firewall rules enabled by default, you will need to configure the particular firewall rules to gain access to the web server we’ll start in the guide.

sudo service iptables stop

If you’d like to lock down security more, here are the ports that need to be opened up:

22 - SSH 80 - HTTP 443 - HTTPS (optional) 4505 - salt 4506 - salt

SELinux

Getting things working using SELinux could be an entirely separate guide. For our purposes, it’s completely out of scope, so we’re going to disable it.

Note

You will be required to restart the machine during this step.

# Edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux and make sure the line beginning
# with SELINUX looks like:
SELINUX=disabled

# If it was already disabled you can skip the following, however
# if you switched the policy from anything other than 'disabled'
# you need to relabel the filesystem to remove the garbage that
# SELinux has added. This *requires* a restart to take effect.
touch /.autorelabel
reboot

# When the machine is back up, you can confirm SELinux is not
# running
>>> selinuxenabled
>>> echo $?
>>> 1

# If the output is 1 you're good to go.

Postgres

Note

Please skip this section if you are using a different database or already have a supported database server running elsewhere.

Install Postgres server:

sudo yum install https://download.postgresql.org/pub/repos/yum/9.5/redhat/rhel-7-x86_64/pgdg-centos95-9.5-3.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install postgresql

Start Postgres server:

sudo service postgresql start

Below we’ll create a stackdio database and grant permissions to the stackdio user for that database.

Warning

We’re not focusing on security here, so the default postgres setup definitely needs to be tweaked, passwords changed, etc., but for a quick-start guide this is out of scope. Please, don’t run this as-is in production :)

sudo -u postgres psql postgres <<EOF
CREATE USER stackdio WITH UNENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'password';
CREATE DATABASE stackdio;
ALTER DATABASE stackdio OWNER to stackdio;
EOF

Core requirements

  • libpq-devel (the c header files for compiling the python postgres client)
  • python-devel (for compiling native python libraries)
  • redis-server (for our cache / message queue)
  • nginx (for serving static files)

To quickly get up and running, you can run the following to install the required packages.

# Install requirements needed to install stackd.io
sudo yum install libpq-devel python-devel redis-server nginx

Next Steps

You’re now finished with the CentOS-specific requirements for stackd.io. You can head back over to the Manual Install and continue the installation of stackd.io.