There are a lot of good feature requests for simplytest.me which I could not address yet, I want to explain why:

The service as it is today was not build to provide anything else than to
- select a project
- select a version
and get a sandbox of this.

Because of the very very very wanted feature request such as
- adding additional projects
- applying patches
I had to introduce a lot of ugly hacks to make the service better.

But the feature requests keep coming and the submission interface has to provide more and more options,
which is a huge problem for the current architecture of the service. For every new option we decide to add
we increase the complexity of the service exponentially.

This is why I decided to stop implementing any further additional features into the current service and start to
work on proper abstraction layers within the service.

The most important part of it will be a new project I started for this called on.acid.am - "mass web deployment on drugs"

The overall service architecture will change from
simplytest.me <-> simplytest.me-servers

to

simplytest.me <-> api.simplytest.me <-> api.on.acid.am <-> on.acid.am-servers

this means an overall rewrite of the simplytest.me architecture but it also means an extreme advantage of
flexibility, maintainability and speed - and therefore a relaunch of the simplytest.me service.

Keep the feature requests coming! But please give me some time to get this done ;-)

Comments

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented
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patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented
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patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented
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klonos’s picture

klonos
he/him
Primary language English
Location 90% Melbourne, Australia - 10% Larissa, Greece
commented

I hate to be the one to ask, but any updates?

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

No problem with that, but I'm afraid I haven't been able to do much yet.. (turns out there's not much time left when you move, learn for exams and have to pay the damn rent)..
Sorry, I'll update this issue as soon as I'm able to continue working on this but atm there's quite some stuff in my way :-(

klonos’s picture

klonos
he/him
Primary language English
Location 90% Melbourne, Australia - 10% Larissa, Greece
commented

No problem Patrick - Real Life™ goes first. Thanx for the very prompt reply and for letting us know.

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

happy to report that I've found time to continue to work on the new back end of simplytest.me.

I'll try to make something happen until DC Amsterdam

wim leers’s picture

wim leers
Location Ghent 🇧🇪🇪🇺
commented

Orchestrating fat whales on drugs.

ROFL :D

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

it's docker! get it? get it??? :)

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

another short update:

I've been busy this week experimenting a lot with CoreOS and beginning to set up a cluster.

My target is to encapsulate the old system as it is now into docker so that I can start work on the new one without needing more servers.

2 servers have already been migrated to coreos:
a.acid.am - my own server intended as cluster lead
b.acid.am - sponsored server by druid.fi

to be mirgrated:
s2.simplytest.me - Ubuntu 14.04 running PHP 5.5 (for Drupal 8) - sponsored by maloon
s3.simplytest.me - Ubuntu 12.04 running PHP 5.3 (for Drupal 6 + 7) - sponsored by realityloop
monitoring server - sponsored by bright solutions

as CoreOS does at least need 3 nodes to run fleet properly I'll now try get PHP 5.5 running on s3 too using an own compilation and fastcgi wrapper files to switch between them.

If that works out s2 will become c.acid.am and the 3rd node in the cluster.

If that worked, I'll put the old system into a docker container

If that works I'll configure simplytest.me to use the dockert containers instead of s3

Then s3 will become d.acid.am and added as the 4th node

and then we will see if it was worth the effort :)

wim leers’s picture

wim leers
Location Ghent 🇧🇪🇪🇺
commented

Sounds wonderful! :)

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

okay s3 is now running php5.5 for d8 and php5.3 for everything else

switching by fcgi does work great :)

  # Decide the PHP version to use based on the core version.
  if [ "$S_COREVERSION" == "8" ]; then
    S_PHP_VERSION="5.5"
  else
    S_PHP_VERSION="5.3"
  fi

  # Write CGI wrapper (necessary for secure apache/cgi user change by suExec).
  echo "#!/bin/bash
    umask 022
    PHPRC=/home/$S_ID
    export PHPRC
    exec /home/spawner/binphp/php$S_PHP_VERSION" > "/var/www/wrappers/$S_ID/php"

unfortunately installing d8 will currently fail as I it seems I'm still using MyISAM on s3 which is no longer supported in d8
(I'm on it)

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

future sandboxes on s3 will now use InnoDB by default, d8 installs fine

as all submissions are now launched on the same server the sandbox-sites might be a bit slower now, but s3 is quite the beast and should be able to handle it

no new submissions will be started on s2,
I'll now wait 1-2 hours and see whether everything works fine on s3.

if it does I'll roll coreos over s2 and continue as described in #7,
otherwise we'll have to fall back to s2 again

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

I've tried *really* hard to get a CoreOS cluster running on the bare-metal servers - after full 3 days without any progress to get a stable environment up giving up on it :-(

Looks like I'll need to look for a different solution.. or just use CoreOS without it's clustering, managing each server separately.

CoreOS is not bad, it feels like a great operating system for Docker - but the clustering mechanisms are not in any way reliable yet.

This is at least my experience with it (after ~46h), maybe I'm just a fucking idiot..

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented
Issue summary: View changes

today acid.am expires

my review of the .am domain provider:
- they fucked up payment
- they save passwords in plain text
- they have some obvious xss issues that they still weren't able to fix
- they ignored any of my mails regarding this stuff

I'm giving up on the "on.acid.am" and will probably do this instead on ventral.org which is my oldest domain that I never had issues with.

raj45’s picture

raj45 commented

Thanks for your hard work on simplytest.me Patrick!

I think simplytest.me is worthy of sponsorship by the Drupal organisation. It has definitely become a central part of my Drupal tool kit , and I think every Drupal developer or site builder ought to use simplytest.me to test out interesting modules, or site scenarios.

I hope you are making good progress on the conversion, and that we all eventually will see the new and improved simplytest.me in the new year.

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

Thanks Rasmus,

Holly contacted me and offered her support.

Unfortunately I could not spend as much time on simplytest.me in 2014 as I would have liked to.
(moving out from my parents house, working at a startup and doing bachelor exams took a lot of time)

Right now, money is less a problem than having the actual time to plan and make big changes.

I know I've made promises about this since 2013 and I'm really sorry this is taking so long :(

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented
Status: Active » Closed (outdated)

:-/

patrickd’s picture

patrickd commented

3 years later I finally made up my mind how to do this and the first iteration can be checked out at https://new.simplytest.me/

the code is still opensource (8.x-3.x) branch although it now uses (my own) proprietary "cloud" service https://spawn.sh/

if there is an honest interest in helping with the development of simplytest.me I can give free access to use it – i know this seems like a barrier but compared to the current simplytest.me the dev-environment setup time has gone down from 3h to 10min...