Running tinytinyRSS on Cloud Foundry

Google Reader is going away in a week or so, and my friends have been asking me where I’m migrating all of my feed reading activities to. The answer for me is a combination of Flipboard and Feedly (both of which I recommend), but for those who prefer a more traditional Reader-style UI and also to retain ownership of their data, running tinytinyRSS is a possible alternative. I’d heard about it, but was tipped off to it again by my friend Dave Neary over at Red Hat

tinytinyRSS is a PHP application and needs a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. It offers the ability to import an OPML file (basically an XML format for listing RSS subscriptions), as well as various other capabilities and plugins.

Since we launched Cloud Foundry Hosted Developer Edition (aka CF v2) last week, I thought I’d find out how much effort it would be to install and run ttRSS on our new platform. It should “just work” – with buildpack support, you can now bring your own runtime to the platform… and we currently have free Marketplace SQL offerings from ElephantSQL and clearDB. Checks all the boxes!

Here’s what happened when I set up ttRSS on run.pivotal.io (the new URL where Cloud Foundry Hosted Developer Edition from Pivotal runs, replacing the old cloudfoundry.com beta hosted service).

First, I read the installation guide and downloaded the latest release tarball (linked at the bottom of the main wiki page). Then I unpacked the tarball on my Mac.

Once inside the release directory, I decided to just “push” the app to Cloud Foundry. I knew I’d need a PHP runtime, so my first thought was to point at the Heroku PHP buildpack (CF v2 is compatible with many Heroku buildpacks). I grabbed the URL and entered the following:

Tiny-Tiny-RSS-1.8  cf push --buildpack=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php
Name> tinytiny

Instances> 1

1: 64M
2: 128M
3: 256M
Memory Limit> 256M

Creating tinytiny... OK

1: tinytiny
2: none
Subdomain> tinytiny

1: cfapps.io
2: mqttbridge.com
3: none
Domain> 1

Creating route tinytiny.cfapps.io... OK
Binding tinytiny.cfapps.io to tinytiny... OK

Create services for application?> y

1: blazemeter n/a, via blazemeter
2: cleardb n/a, via cleardb
3: cloudamqp n/a, via cloudamqp
4: elephantsql n/a, via elephantsql
5: mongolab n/a, via mongolab
6: rediscloud n/a, via garantiadata
7: treasuredata n/a, via treasuredata
What kind?> 4

Name?> elephantsql-53b67

1: turtle: Tiny Turtle
Which plan?> 1

Creating service elephantsql-53b67... OK
Binding elephantsql-53b67 to tinytiny... OK
Create another service?> n

Bind other services to application?> n

Save configuration?> y

Saving to manifest.yml... OK
Uploading tinytiny... OK
Starting tinytiny... OK
-----> Downloaded app package (3.1M)
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/buildpacks/heroku-buildpack-php/.git/
Installing heroku-buildpack-php.
-----> Bundling Apache version 2.2.22
-----> Bundling PHP version 5.3.10
-----> Uploading staged droplet (12M)
-----> Uploaded droplet
Checking tinytiny...
Staging in progress...
Staging in progress...
  0/1 instances: 1 starting
  1/1 instances: 1 running
OK

Hurrah! The app is deployed! Note that while I was running through the steps here, I also chose to provision an ElephantSQL instance and bind it to my app. I could also have done that via the Marketplace in the Web Console before pushing the app. The tinytinyRSS wiki suggested that it performs better with Postgres than it does with MySQL, so I chose to use that.

The next step in the regular installation is to visit the URL (in this case http://tinytiny.cfapps.io) and check that things are working OK. When I got there, I found a form asking me to fill in the database credentials.

That’s a small issue – right now, there is no autoconfiguration for PHP apps with databases on Cloud Foundry, and I hadn’t modified the application code to grab the information from anywhere in the environment. Fortunately, there is a way to find out what the settings should be – via the env.log file in the application container. Running cf logs got me back the contents of the file. VCAP_SERVICES is where I needed to look.

VCAP_SERVICES={"elephantsql-n/a":[{"name":"elephantsql-53b67","label":"elephantsql-n/a","plan":"turtle","credentials":{"uri":"postgres://xxxxkjkj:lbI7r3Bh@babar.elephantsql.com:5432/xxxxkjkj"}}]}

I’ve modified the values here, for obvious reasons, but I plugged the values from the elephantsql service right into the form… hit the Test DB button… and got an error that my PHP runtime didn’t have support for mbstring…

Hmm!

Fortunately, there’s another buildpack for Heroku which adds PHP support, and does have support for mbstring (as well as using nginx instead of Apache, and a few other tweaks). I thought I’d give that one a go instead. I’d already saved my application settings to the manifest.yml file, so I could not just push a second time with a different buildpack, I had to use the --reset flag to apply the change:

Tiny-Tiny-RSS-1.8  cf push --buildpack=https://github.com/iphoting/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler.git --reset
Using manifest file manifest.yml

Uploading tinytiny... OK
Changes:
  buildpack: 'https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php' -> 'https://github.com/iphoting/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler.git'
Updating tinytiny... OK
Stopping tinytiny... OKStarting tinytiny... OK
-----> Downloaded app package (3.1M)
-----> Downloaded app buildpack cache (4.0K)
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/buildpacks/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler.git/.git/
Installing heroku-buildpack-php-tyler.git.
-----> Fetching Manifest

https://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler/manifest.md5sum

-----> Installing Nginx
       Bundling Nginx v1.4.1

https://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler/nginx-1.4.1-heroku.tar.gz

-----> Installing libmcrypt
       Bundling libmcrypt v2.5.8

https://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler/libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.gz

-----> Installing libmemcached
       Bundling libmemcached v1.0.7

https://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler/libmemcached-1.0.7.tar.gz

-----> Installing PHP
       Bundling PHP v5.4.12

https://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler/php-5.4.12-with-fpm-heroku.tar.gz

-----> Installing newrelic
       Bundling newrelic daemon v2.9.5.78

https://s3.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-php-tyler/newrelic-2.9.5.78-heroku.tar.gz

-----> Copying config files
-----> Installing boot script
-----> Done with compile
-----> Uploading staged droplet (38M)
-----> Uploaded droplet
Checking tinytiny...
Staging in progress...
Staging in progress...
Staging in progress...
  0/1 instances: 1 starting
  0/1 instances: 1 starting
  0/1 instances: 1 starting
  1/1 instances: 1 running
OK

Success again! reloading the configuration page, I was greeted with confirmation that the database connection was now working.

After this, I simply needed to initialise the database, save the configuration, login, change my password, and import my Google Reader OPML file (there are ttRSS plugins which also allow you to import your whole Google Takeout from Reader, including likes and shares).

As I said, I’m personally a big fan of Feedly and I don’t think I’ll be using ttRSS full-time, but this was a really nice and very quick way to prove that Cloud Foundry v2 is ready to host these kind of apps – even with the redeployment step to swap buildpacks. You might want to give it a try!