I'm doing some comparative analysis of various distributed non-relational databases and consequently wrestled with the installation of Riak on a server running Debian Lenny.
I relied upon the standard "erlang" debian package, which installs cleanly on a basically bare system without a hitch (as one would expect). However, the latest Riak's "make" tasks fail to run; this is because the rebar script on which the make tasks rely chokes on various bad characters:
riak@nosql-01:~/riak$ make all rel ./rebar compile ./rebar:2: syntax error before: PK ./rebar:11: illegal atom ./rebar:30: illegal atom ./rebar:72: illegal atom ./rebar:76: syntax error before: ��n16 ./rebar:79: syntax error before: ',' ./rebar:91: illegal integer ./rebar:149: illegal atom ./rebar:160: syntax error before: Za��ze ./rebar:172: illegal atom ./rebar:176: illegal atom escript: There were compilation errors. make: *** [compile] Error 127
Delicious.
Ultimately, I came across this article describing issues getting Riak to install on Ubuntu 9.04, and ultimately determined that the Erlang version mentioned seemed to apply here. Following the article's instructions for building Erlang from source worked out fine, and so far I've been able to start, ping, and stop the local Riak server without incident.
Since a true investigation requires running these kinds of tools in a cluster, and that means automation of the installation/configuration is desirable, I've been scripting out the configuration steps (putting things into a configuration management tool like Puppet will come later when we're farther along and closer to picking the right solution for the problem in question). So, here's the script I've been running to build these things from my local machine (relying upon SSH); these are rough, a work in progress, and are not intended as examples of excellence, elegance, or beauty -- they simply get the job done (so far) for me and may help somebody else.
#!/bin/sh hostname=$1 erlang_release=otp_src_R13B04 riak_release=riak-0.8.1 ssh root@$hostname " # necessary for Erlang build apt-get install build-essential libncurses5-dev m4 apt-get install openssl libssl-dev # standard from-source build mkdir erlang-build cd erlang-build wget http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/lang/erlang/download/$erlang_release.tar.gz tar xzf $erlang_release.tar.gz cd $erlang_release ./configure make make install # put all of riak in a riak user useradd -m riak su -c 'wget http://bitbucket.org/basho/riak/downloads/$riak_release.tar.gz' - riak su -c 'tar xzf $riak_release.tar.gz' - riak su -c 'cd $riak_release && make all rel' - riak su -c 'mv $riak_release/rel riak' - riak "
(I have other scripts for preparing the box post-OS-install, but I don't think they impact this particular part of the process.)
2 comments:
Once you have build a Riak release, aka the 'rel' directory, you can copy it to other machines and run Riak directly from it. You'll still need to tweak the config files as required for each host, though.
The release is completely self-contained including Erlang and Riak so as long as your cluster runs on the same type of hardware you should be able to use the release everywhere.
Kevin: yes, that's helpful, and the available literature is pretty clear on that point (you're quite possibly the person responsible for said literature). Thanks.
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