Thumbor on OpenShift

This project is a sample of how to deploy Thumbor to OpenShift Cloud. Thumbor is an open-source image processing service created by Globo.com. In a few words, Thumbor is perfect to decouple your application from any image processing job (thumbnail generation, image resizing, image optimization, etc) and let you focus in your core problem. You can learn more about Thumbor project in their wiki page.

This implementation is based on the cartridge diy-0.1.

Setting up

First you will need to create an account at OpenShift, it's for free and you won't need anything more than the free tier offer to have your own Thumbor working.

After having your account you can download and setup the command line tool. It's as simple as:

gem install rhc

Then you can login in your account and follow the setup steps using the command:

rhc setup

Creating the environment

Now you will need to create a application in your account at OpenShift. You will use this project as base code for your environment. We will use the application named thumborservice in this tutorial.

rhc create-app thumborservice -t diy-0.1 --from-code=https://github.com/rafaelcaricio/thumbor-openshift-example

After running this command it will automatically clone the project in your current directory. You can check if your application is working accessing http://thumborservice-{your namespace}.rhcloud.com.

Installing Python

Since we are using an empty environment to deploy our thumbor server. We will need to install the python interpreter manually. First we will need to log in our server via ssh to configure the Python 2.7 release.

rhc ssh thumborservice

At this point you should be logged in your application server. We will build everything in the tmp/ directory.

cd $OPENSHIFT_TMP_DIR

Download the Python 2.7

wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7.3/Python-2.7.3.tar.bz2

Extract:

tar jxf Python-2.7.3.tar.bz2

Configure (you should configure your custom Python into the OpenShift runtime dir):

cd Python-2.7.3

./configure --prefix=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR

Make and install:

make install

It will take some time to configure and compile, but after you can check if everything is ok by running:

$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/bin/python -V

You should see in your console:

Python 2.7.3

Installing Setuptools

Change into the OpenShift "tmp" directory:

cd $OPENSHIFT_TMP_DIR

Download and install setuptools:

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/setuptools/setuptools-3.6.tar.gz

tar zxf setuptools-3.6.tar.gz

cd setuptools-3.6

Install:

$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/bin/python setup.py install

Installing PIP

Change into the OpenShift "tmp" directory:

cd $OPENSHIFT_TMP_DIR

Download and install setuptools:

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pip/pip-1.5.6.tar.gz

tar zxf pip-1.5.6.tar.gz

cd pip-1.5.6

Install:

$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/bin/python setup.py install

Deployment

First you will need to configure your environment variables to use your own Amazon S3 credentials. You can just copy the .env-example file and then modify it to use your own configuration.

cp .env-example .env

Then you will have the .env file with the following content:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY=xxx
AWS_SECRET_KEY=yyy
RESULT_STORAGE_BUCKET=kkk
STORAGE_BUCKET=zzz

Substitute the values to reflect the Amazon configurations. Then push the values to the thumborservice app using:

cat .env | xargs -n 1 rhc env set -a thumborservice

Then after that all you need is to deploy your application. Since we did not needed to change anything in the project to make it work, we just do an empty commit and push the server.

git commit --allow-empty -m "Deploy"

Start the deployment:

git push

You should see in your console the installation of the dependencies like the Thumbor itself. To check if everything worked like expected, you can start using your own instance of thumbor going to:

http://thumborservice-{your namespace}.rhcloud.com/unsafe/100x100/http://i.imgur.com/Iwyd86K.jpg

Congratulations, you have your Thumbor up and running. It's extremly recommended to you to take a look at the Thumbor configuration variables and change the thumbor.conf to fit better your needs.