VPS Test run FileCloud on a VPS or Virtual Machine in 5 min

December 24, 2013

Test run FileCloud on a VPS or Virtual Machine in 5 minutes FileCloud is a file storage management system which provides a private file sharing and mobile access solution for Enterprises. What’s more is that it doesn’t have the drawbacks of public cloud storage systems, including and not limited to, handling and storage of sensitive […]

Test run FileCloud on a VPS or Virtual Machine in 5 minutes

FileCloud is a file storage management system which provides a private file sharing and mobile access solution for Enterprises. What’s more is that it doesn’t have the drawbacks of public cloud storage systems, including and not limited to, handling and storage of sensitive data.

Before you try out FileCloud on your main server, you might want to give it a test run. By doing so, you will be able to explore the different features of FileCloud before you install it on your main servers. This tutorial takes you through the process of installation of a FileCloud server on a VPS (or) Virtual Machine (VM) running Ubuntu 12.04 in less than 5 minutes.

VPS  are provided by many cloud service providers like Amazon EC2, Windows Azure and Digital Ocean. In this case, we will be using an instance of Digital Ocean with the very basic configuration (512 MB memory, 20 GB storage).

When you create a VM in Digital Ocean, you are given access as a root user, with no other users on the system. You gain access to the system by running the following in the command line.

ssh root@162.243.83.175

I am assuming here that you have been provided with the IP address to your virtual machine. In Digital Ocean, it appears on your dashboard and also in the confirmation email that you receive after setting up the VM. In Amazon EC2, however, you are given a URL like ecx-xx-xxx-x-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com- you need to set up an ‘Elastic IP’ for your VM separately. Assuming you have root access to the system, you need to create a user to start the installation. You can continue through root, but it is highly recommended that you create a separate user. We also add the user to the sudoers list so that it is able to make important changes to the system. We use the username ‘tbb’.

adduser tbb

adduser tbb sudo #adding to sudoers list

su tbb # logging in tbb user

In the mail that you receive from FileCloud on installation, you get the instructions on how to install the product. In it, you also get the link to the debian file and the license file. You use wget to download the file into your VM.

wget <link_to_file>

tar zxvf file_cloud_rpm.tgz # Unzip the contents

sudo apt-get update

You run sudo apt-get update to update the package lists, so that all new versions of software are installed in the next command.

sudo bash install.sh

The installation is pretty straight forward, and the installer does all the work for you. The only point where you need to feed some data into the installer is when it asks for a valid cloud storage path. Is the path in the system where you would store your files. In this example, we choose the home folder of the user tbb.

Enter Valid Cloud Storage Path: /home/tbb/

The last part of the installation is to copy the licence file to /var/www/config. You probably have it in your local system. To copy it from your local system to the VM, run the scp command.

    scp licence.xml tbb@162.243.83.175:~/

The ‘~’ after the IP address indicates that I am moving it to the home folder. Once in the system, copy it to the config folder.

cp licence /var/www/config/

Restart the apache2 web server by running.

    sudo service apache2 restart

You can run the checks by visiting the URL (http://162.243.233.215/install/) on a web browser to run the basic checks. In our case, everything seems to be running fine. The only check that failed is the absence of a PHP LDAP library, which is optional.

You can run the Extended checks by clicking on the link give on the page (http://162.243.233.215/install/?extended=1). The checks that fail in our case happen because we haven’t changed the admin email (which is support@filecloud.com by default), the SMTP server and the Server URL. These settings can be changed from the admin panel.

If you performed the steps correctly, you should have the server running properly. On going to http://162.243.83.175, you are redirected to the user portal of FileCloud (which runs on Apache2, PHP and MongoDB.)

No users have been created yet. So you need to login as an admin through a different URL- http://162.243.233.215/ui/admin/index.html .

Provide the admin password you supplied during installation and you will be able to login. After logging in, you should see the following screen.

We hope that this post helped you get an insight on how to setup FileCloud on a VM. You can refer to the admin documentation if you have any issues. Alternately, you could also let us know in the comments.

By Team FileCloud