MapIt AMI for EC2

To help people to get started with MapIt, we have created an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) with a basic installation of MapIt, which you can use to create a running server on an Amazon EC2 instance.

If you haven’t used Amazon Web Services before, then you can get a Micro instance which will be free for a year.

The AMI can be found in the EU West (Ireland) region, with the ID ami-fda8a989 and name “Basic MapIt installation 2012-10-02b”. You can launch an instance based on that AMI with this link.

When you create an EC2 instance based on that AMI, make sure that you choose Security Groups that allows at least inbound HTTP, HTTPS and SSH.

When your EC2 instance is launched, you will be able to log in as the ubuntu user. This user can sudo freely to run commands as root. However, the code is actually owned by (and runs as) the mapit user. After creating the instance, you may want to edit a configuration file to set a couple of parameters. That configuration file is /home/mapit/mapit/conf/general.yml, which can be edited with:

ubuntu@ip-10-58-191-98:~$ sudo su - mapit
mapit@ip-10-58-191-98:~$ cd mapit
mapit@ip-10-58-191-98:~/mapit$ nano conf/general.yml

You should set BUGS_EMAIL to your email address. You should also consider the SRID and COUNTRY settings, as described in the manual installation instructions.

Note if you change the SRID at this point, you will need to revert and then re-migrate the database as it will already have been set up with the initial SRID:

./manage.py migrate mapit zero
./manage.py migrate mapit

Then you should then restart the MapIt Django server with:

mapit@ip-10-58-191-98:~/mapit$ logout
ubuntu@ip-10-58-191-98:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/mapit restart

You will need to create an admin user if you want to be able to use MapIt’s web admin interface. To create an admin user, you need to use the createsuperuser Django admin command, similar to the following example:

ubuntu@ip-10-64-6-199:~$ sudo su - mapit
mapit@ip-10-64-6-199:~$ cd mapit/project/
mapit@ip-10-64-6-199:~/mapit/project$ ./manage.py createsuperuser
Username (Leave blank to use 'mapit'): mapitadmin
E-mail address: whoever@example.org
Password:
Password (again):
Superuser created successfully.

… and check that you can now login to the admin interface by visiting /admin on your site.

Now you will probably want to carry on to import some data.