• Document Up to Date
  • Updated On 4.0.3

Setting up a CrafterCMS production environment

This section lets you get started on setting up your CrafterCMS for production. A production environment normally consists of one authoring instance and one or more delivery instances.

Before we begin, please review the following for requirements and supported platforms: Requirements and Supported Platforms

Setting up the production environment

  1. We’ll first install the authoring instance. You can follow the Quick Start Guide to install and start authoring.

  2. Create your project in authoring. You can follow the guide Your First Project to use one of the out-of-the-box blueprints provided by CrafterCMS.

  3. Now that you have a project setup in authoring, the next thing to do is to setup your project in the delivery instance(s). Let’s begin the delivery installation.

    Installing the delivery instance is almost the same as installing the authoring instance. The difference is, you need to download/use crafter-cms-delivery-VERSION.tar.gz. Follow the same steps used to install your authoring environment using the delivery binary files.

  4. After starting delivery, we’ll setup the project we created in step 2 in our delivery instance. CrafterCMS comes with a script, init-site.sh, to help us setup our project for delivery.

    ./init-site.sh [options] [project] [repo-path]

    Note

    Remember that when using private key SSH authentication, the private key path must be set explicitly using the -k option. Here’s an example:

    init-site -k ~/.ssh/jdoe_key myeditorial ssh://myserver/opt/crater/sites/myeditorial

    See the guide Setup Project for a Delivery Environment for more information on setting up your project for delivery.

  5. For the rest of the delivery instances, you can just repeat the previous 2 steps for each one of them, or alternatively just duplicate the delivery installation directory for each instance.

  6. Your production environment is now ready.

For more information on using gradle, please see CrafterCMS.

Server Hardware Configuration Consideration

CrafterCMS performs multiple reads/writes to disk from various concerns such as the database, the repository, logs, etc. with very different I/O patterns. One of the primary factor for hardware bottlenecks is disk I/O.

For optimal performance, the server should have different storage systems (disks) mounted for different concerns, for example:

/dev/{dev0} -> /
/dev/{dev1} -> /opt/crafter/data/db
/dev/{dev2} -> /opt/crafter/data/repos
/dev/{dev3} -> /opt/crafter/data/indexes
/dev/{dev4} -> /opt/crafter/logs
/dev/{dev5} -> /opt/crafter/data/mongodb
/dev/{dev6} -> /var
/dev/{dev7} -> /home
/dev/{dev8} -> /usr

For more information on tuning your authoring environment for better performance, please see: Authoring Environment Performance Tuning

Set Profile Cookies to Secure

For production environments using Crafter Profile and/or the Security Provider, these properties should be added to server-config.properties configuration file to make the Crafter Profile cookies be sent only through HTTPS

CRAFTER_HOME/bin/apache-tomcat/shared/classes/crafter/engine/extension/server-config.properties
1# Indicates whether the cookie should be only sent using a secure protocol, like HTTPS or SSL
2crafter.security.cookie.ticket.secure=true
3# Indicates whether the cookie should be only sent using a secure protocol, like HTTPS or SSL
4crafter.security.cookie.profileLastModified.secure=true
5# Indicates whether the cookie should be only sent using a secure protocol, like HTTPS or SSL
6crafter.security.cookie.rememberMe.secure=true

System Configuration for Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch uses a lot of file descriptors or file handles. Elasticsearch recommends increasing the number of open file descriptors for the user running Elasticsearch to 65,536 or higher.

CrafterCMS uses the .zip ELasticsearch package. When using the .zip package, the system settings for increasing the number of open file descriptors can be configured:

  • temporarily with ulimit, or

  • permanently in /etc/security/limits.conf

Set Temporary Limits

To set temporary limits for the open file handles (ulimit -n) to 65,536:

1sudo su
2ulimit -n 65535
3su elasticsearch

Here’s what the above lines of code is doing:

  1. Become root.

  2. Change the max number of open files.

  3. Become the elasticsearch user in order to start Elasticsearch.

Remember that this new limit is only valid for the current session.

Set Persistent Limits

To set persistent limits, edit the /etc/security/limits.conf file. To set the maximum number of open files for the elasticsearch user to 65,536, add the following line to the limits.conf file:

elasticsearch  -  nofile  65535

Remember to restart your system as this change will only take effect the next time the elasticsearch user opens a new session.

Note

Ubuntu ignores the limits.conf file for processes started by init.d. To enable the limits.conf file, edit /etc/pam.d/su and uncomment the following line:

# session    required   pam_limits.so

For more information on configuring system settings in Elasticsearch, see: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/setting-system-settings.html

For more information on file descriptors in Elasticsearch, see: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/file-descriptors.html