SydPHP's public website

The SydPHP public website is built on CakePHP and uses the Meetup API in order to retrieve all information.

Requirements

An API Key from Meetup
CakePHP 2.3
Webserver (Nginx, Apache, etc..)
PHP (5.3+)

Setup

Clone the application from Github. The following clone URI will change based on your access rights. Double check the SydPHP Github page for the correct URI:

git clone git@github.com:sydphp/sydphp.org.git

Initialise the submodules:

cd sydphp.org
git submodule update --init --recursive

Setup configuration files:

cp Config/core.php.default Config/core.php

Setup database information (Meetup.com API Access). You will need your Meetup API Key for this step:

Into Config/database.php, place the following content:

<?php
class DATABASE_CONFIG {
	public $meetup = array(
		'database' => null,
		'datasource' => 'Meetup.MeetupSource',
		'key' => 'YOUR-API-KEY-HERE',
	);
}

Remember to replace YOUR-API-KEY-HERE with your actual API key from Meetup.

Edit the webroot/index.php file to indicate the location of CakePHP 2.0. The following is an example:

define('CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH', '/home/sydphp/cakephp-2.0/lib');

Make sure that you don't commit the webroot/index.php file to git (otherwise it will cause problems in production):

git update-index --assume-unchanged webroot/index.php

Once this is complete, you can setup your webserver. The document root for the application should be set as the sydphp.org/webroot/ directory.

We recommend that you setup a virtualhost to host the application, and run a development domain. Change your hosts file to include a new domain for use with this website:

127.0.0.1   sydphp.dev

Note, the above will change if you are using a virtual machine, a remote server or similar for development. You can also change the domain name to whatever you like, as long as your webserver configuration has the same domain name for the virtual host configuration.

Finally, make sure that the tmp/ directory is writable by your webserver/PHP. The simplest way to do this in development is to ensure everyone has access to write that directory:

chmod -R 777 tmp

You're ready to go! Loading up your website (for example: http://sydphp.dev) should now show the SydPHP website.

Deployment

We've included a "fabric" file for easing deployment to our production server. Fabric is an automation system built with python, and we utilise a "deploy" module to ease the deployment further. The deploy submodule will be downloaded when you did the git submodule initialisation earier.

Requirements

In order to deploy the site with Fabric, you need the following:

Python (Install differs based on your operating system)
Fabric
- easy_install fabric or pip install fabric
SSH Agent Forwarding

If you are deploying to the SydPHP production server, you will need to have previously been granted access to SSH with your private/public SSH key pair.

If you are deploying this on to your own server, ensure that your SSH public key is listed in the destination users .ssh/authorized_keys file so you can SSH into the machine without providing a password.

SSH Agent Forwarding is a mechanism by which your SSH public key on your local machine is used for SSH authentication no matter what server you are logged in to. This is a means by which the server is left clean and tidy without the need to setup deploy keys or store personal SSH keys.

To enable SSH forwarding, your SSH client needs to have loaded your SSH private key to be able to handle incoming SSH AUTH requests. On windows, you can use a tool like Pageant. On Linux and OSX you can use the existing SSH commands:

ssh-add

This will add your default ~/.ssh/id_rsa file to the SSH agent. If you want to use a different private key, provide the path to the file after the command.

Performing the deploy

Doing the actual deploy, once the above has been setup, is very easy. Deploy to production with the following command:

fab

Note: Before you execute this command, you will need to ensure that your changes in the repository have been pushed up to the github master branch, as this is where the server clones code from.

Blah Stuff

Changelog

2012-11-28 Original Readme version (Graham Weldon)