GMOD Cloud Tutorial

Setting up an AWS Account

Rather than us writing a lot of content here, we'll start with a link to the Amazon getting started guide. At a minimum, we suggest the general getting started guide as well as the guide for the free usage tier.

Finding and Starting a GMOD Cloud AMI

The ID of the current GMOD in the Cloud Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is on the main [Cloud|GMOD in the Cloud] page. To find it in Amazon's management page, go to AMIs section under Images in the EC2 Management Console. Search public images for that ID or "GMOD in the Cloud" and right or control click on the most recent version. This will bring up a menu and select "launch image" from this menu. You will be presented with a pop up window to configure the image. You can accept all of the defaults unless you really want a more powerful machine. If not, select the "micro" instance, which if you don't have any other micro instances available, and you're still new to AWS, will be free for a year. For a more powerful machine, select something else. Press continue.

In the next window, you should be able to accept all of the defaults. Press continue.

In the next window, you might want to give your instance a name so you can easily identify it later. You could try something like "first GMOD in the Cloud instance". Press continue.

In the next window, you are asked to provide or create a key pair so that you may remotely log in. If you don't already have one, select "Create key pair". Give it a name and down load the key pair. Remember where you downloaded it to, because you'll need it later to log into your machine. Press continue.

Next you'll be asked to configure the firewall. You'll need access on ports 22 (ssh) and 80 (http) If there is a "default" option, you can probably accept it. If not, select "Create new security group" and select SSH and HTTP from the drop down list, clicking "add rule" for each. Give it a useful name like "default". Press continue and close until your instance gets created.

Directory Structure

When you log into your GMOD Cloud instance, you will be in the ubuntu user's home directory, /home/ubuntu, which is part of the root partition of the machine, and so, if you save anything in this directory, it will be deleted when you move to a new version of the GMOD Cloud. To save items from one machine to the next, it must be saved on your EBS partition, and to make that easier from the home directory, we've put in a link to the /data partition in the home directory named "dataHome", so you can "cd /home/ubuntu/dataHome" or "cd ~/dataHome" to save files in a convenient spot relative to your home directory. Already in this dataHome directory is a file called "bashrc" which is automatically included in your .bashrc when you log in, so if you have changes you'd like to make to your shell environment, you can add those changes here.

There are several other directories that are on the /data partition so they will be saved when you go to a new instance as well. These are:

/data/etc/gbrowse	The config directory for GBrowse.
/data/etc/postgresql	The config directory for PostgreSQL
/data/opt	A good place to install any other software you want to use
/data/var/lib/gbrowse	Other GBrowse files that might be modifed on your instance, including user session data and flat file databases.
/data/var/lib/postgresql	Files for the PostgreSQL database
/data/var/www/.htaccess	The htaccess file for the main Drupal site
/data/var/www/jbrowse	All of the files needed for running JBrowse
/data/var/www/sites/default	Site-specific files and directories for Drupal; modules and themes go here

In all instances, the original files and directories where moved to the /data partition and replaced with symlinks to their new locations. Note that changes made to files in any other locations will be lost. If you find that you must have other files or directories saved, please send an email to gmod-devel@lists.sourceforge.net to request that symlinks be added to future releases.