Server Team Sprint 2015/1

By: Server Team / Michael Stucki

Since 2013 the Server Team is trying to have 4 sprints in every year. This report is about the first sprint in 2015 which took place from March 20-22 at dkd in Frankfurt.

About the Sprint

The sprint was attended mostly by members of the TYPO3 Server Team. However, we invited more people to join us and see what we can learn from each other. This time, Martin Bless, Michael Lihs, Thomas Löffler and Christian Zenker participated as guests at our sprint.

Plans & Achievements

The sprint was planned long before with a few main goals where we wanted to work on. Here are some insights on these projects and how far we got:

Create scripts to simplify repeating tasks

Due to the fact that user credentials for typo3.org, Forge and the TYPO3 Wiki are distributed over multiple severs, it is currently quite hard to change them. The goal was to create an Ansible playbook (kind of a shell script) that lets you change the credentials consistently on every machine with a single command. The task was to find out how to use Ansible to collect the required user data on typo3.org that enables us to change the user data accordingly on other machines and how to make the script convenient and easy to use. Additionally, a small Vagrant setup was created that enables local testing and development. After the sprint it was possible to change the user email and the "framework" provides all the functionality to implement further tasks - e.g. changing the account name.

Solr indexing for docs.typo3.org

Martin Bless and Fabien Udriot started to reorganize the available documentation. This is an ongoing process: You can find out about the progress in a separate blog post by Martin: mbless.de/blog/2015/03/20/solr-for-docs-typo3-org.html. The goal is to have the documentation indexed and searchable at the level of typo3.org

More documentation improvements

Christian Zenker helped Martin Bless to run the Vagrant box of typo3.org. According to Martin, it means that he finally has all the tools and steps for Solr indexing and searching at hand and ready for inspection and development.
These components are:

• Creation of documents at docs.typo3.org
• Solr instance on a server
• Backend access to the Solr instance
• Nutch crawler feeding the Solr index
• TYPO3 backend (in the vagrant box) to administrate the Solr index
• TYPO3 frontend (in the vagrant box) to utilize the stored index

Martin writes: The doors are wide open now to continue development - let's have a party!

Update forge.typo3.org to Redmine v3.0.0

Other than planned, we were not able to work on this task. However, the upgrade is still on top of our agenda.

Upgrade demo.typo3.org

The demo websites have been extended. On the landing page (demo.typo3.org), you'll see a new link to the Neos demo instances. There are currently two sites, the latest stable version (1.2) along with the master (the forthcoming 2.0). In the CMS area, a proper Frontend has been added on branch 7.x. Additionally the master version of CMS has been set up and is kept up-to-date every night. All that, just waiting for you!

Improvements for typo3.org

Thomas and Christian worked on general spam problems, the upcoming TYPO3.org upgrade, and various TER bugs.

An important part of their time was also spent to discuss the revival of the TYPO3.org team which was rarely active after Ben stepped back as team leader.

For more information, see also

• forum.typo3.org/index.php/t/209206/
• forum.typo3.org/index.php/t/209301/

Discourse

We also spent some time to look into Discourse that may become a commenting tool for various TYPO3.org sites in the near future. We got a Docker container with Discourse running and tried to integrate it into a development site of TYPO3.org. Martin Bless took the time to write down our achievements so far: mbless.de/blog/2015/03/21/about-discourse.html

Implement new Single-Signon service for *.typo3.org / LDAP Server for typo3.org

Fabien Udriot, Bastian Bringenberg and Michael Lihs started to work on a Chef environment for implementing an LDAP server for typo3.org. Long term goal is to have an LDAP server that would offer authentication services across our infrastructure. Next step is to continue the configuration of the master directory We are currently in a "collecting info" phase. Any help / return of experience is welcome. We found out, that using Atlassian Crowd will not fit our needs and we still need to setup an OpenLDAP Service on our infrastructure. As soon as this is covered with Chef we are going to migrate all users to LDAP and will use a smart way to move the passwords to ldap. A smooth migration is more important than a fast one.

Setup OpenNebula Infrastruture

By now, we use virtual servers based on OpenVZ. As there is a lot of manual work involved to setup new servers, and the future of OpenVZ is kind of unkown, we looked for a successor for our whole virtualisation infrastructure. We found that OpenNebula does pretty much what we want, and decided to take a deeper look. After installing OpenNebula on a empty Ubuntu Server, we added some virtual machines for testing purposes, for example to run Docker based containers which is not possible within the current OpenVZ infrastructure. There is still a lot of work to do and a lot of questions to answer, but we are confident that OpenNebula will suit us, and we can solve most of the open things within the next few weeks.

Socializing

It's always great to meet in person. We had a lot of good discussions and gathered ideas and energy for many more projects...

Thanks

I would like to thank all participants for coming to the sprint and dedicating their spare time for TYPO3:

• Martin Bless
• Bastian Bringenberg
• Olivier Dobberkau
• Michael Lihs
• Thomas Löffler
• Andri Steiner
• Michael Stucki
• Fabien Udriot
• Christian Zenker
• Philipp Gampe (who visited us spontaneously on his way back from holiday)

We also want to thank our sponsors who are making events like this possible: 

• dkd (www.dkd.de): For letting us use their office, for the good drinks and the fine coffee
• Olivier Dobberkau (@T3RevNeverEnd): For sponsoring Fridays dinner, more drinks, but also for all his motivation & support
• Christof Rodejohann (@UrsaBerlin): For sponsoring a bunch of drinks
• Jari-Hermann Ernst (@jhernst): For sponsoring a bunch of drinks
• Ingo Schmitt (@ischmitt): He actually made a sponsoring for the last sprint in 2014, however I did never manage to write a report for it and mention this. Thanks Ingo, it was appreciated just as much as the sponsorships for any other sprint!
• TYPO3 Association (association.typo3.org): For covering travel & hotel costs

Thank you all!

Final words

As always, if you are interested to know more about our work, please follow us on Twitter (TYPO3server) or talk to us on Slack (forger.typo3.org/slack) in the channel #typo3-server-team. Find out more about our team at typo3.org/teams/server-team/.

This sprint was great in all aspects. We could introduce new people into the work of the server team, and we have made good progress on many of our projects. We are already looking forward to the next meeting which will be at some time around May or June...

See you there!

Michael

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