Setting up Openshift on Digital Ocean Tutorial Video

Intro

Recently I have been very interested in trying out the Openshift platform for hosting my own PaaS to make creating apps on the fly and trying out new technology an easier process. Openshift offers a nice all-in-one bundle that can be completely controlled with their RHC Client Tools on command line, I like to do everything via command line, as well as the ability to host it on your own server, important for clients who want to be on Canadian soil as not too many good PaaS services offer Canadian locations. I eventually had to rule out using Openshift as it became too much to get set up and running when well frankly, it wasn’t worth the time investment. That’s not to say that it was all in vain as taking on a challenge like this really pushed me to figure things out on my own and I learned some useful things along the way.

The process

I derived as much on my own as I could but it was apparent that there was more to this process than I was capable of achieving solo so I decided to try AirPair to get some help with the setup. I was paired with a DevOps guy named Diego Woitasen who was very knowledgable and very useful in getting the process running. AirPair also published our session on youtube so others can learn as well.

This will explain the process very clearly but it is unedited so you will have to sift through the video if you want the knowledge. You can also get the server setup instructions that Diego references in the video inside this pdf. In the end I got a version of openshift that worked for the most part. The two last annoying features were that you had to manually create DNS entries for your apps on Digital Ocean but my StackOverflow question revealed that there are plugins to take care of this. I also had problems trying to connect my php cartridge to my mysql cartridge. That’s when I finally decided that this was not going to work at this point in time. I had already invested too much time getting to this stage when really it should be much shorter process. Hopefully in the future they will make the installation more user friendly but for now I will try something else. At least I curated a bunch of information so that hopefully someone else will get some use from this.