Maybe you think we’ve been on the lazy side for the last couple of weeks? Well, then you are wrong. A lot is happening right now, and a lot of changes to the VMs have been taking place. We have been thinking for a while now if it would be possible to somewhat automate the process of building the VMs because packaging takes time – extracting, packing, find an error, then redo the process again – several times. Yeah, maybe you can imagine… So as a step in making it a bit easier for us Daniel have been working on scripting everything instead, which almost is done by now. Instead of packiging the VM’s all the time, they are now auto-updated every time you download them, and the process of building them is also improved a lot. Now we just use the same VM and put the install scripts that is needed for the version that are going to be released. Our favorite VM right now is the one completely built from scripts – the BETA version. That version is always in sync with the latest changes in the scripts on GitHub, and auto-downloads everything and builds it for you. How cool is that? We don’t have to package it, and you will always get the latest version – well, that’s awesome.
DEV VM
We also released a new DEV VM which is grabbing the latest daily build, so that all you developers out there have a VM to rely on when you do your coding for ownCloud. The DEV VM is built upon PHP 7, and Redis is also included. To update you just have to run the included update script.
OWNCLOUD UPDATE SCRIPT
As the new PHP 7 VMs are built from zip packages and not the repos, we had to remake the update script because the updates are not included via apt-get anymore. We solved that by fetching the latest zip package every time the update script is run. And to be sure that no data is lost the script is backing up all the important folders and checks that everything is in order before proceeding. The only bad thing with this is that the backup is saved on the same hard drive as ownCloud which will require double amount of hard drive space to make a proper backup. Of course you could change that if you want to, just edit the backup variable in the script.
PHP 7
We are aiming for getting all the ownCloud VMs to be shipped with PHP 7, but as it turns out – ownCloud is not completely compatible with PHP 7 yet, and as we can’t call it stable we won’t ship it as production. Even if PHP 7 is working very good as it is right now and we are eager to release a production VM with PHP 7 on, we can’t as it is right now. :( We expect ownCloud 9 to have better support, and also that the dependency issue is solved – hopefully.
Ubuntu Core Snappy
Other than that we are working on a new Raspberry Pie image together with Kyle from Ubuntu. We were one of those to get a Raspberry Pie sent to us from ownCloud and that’s also taking a lot of our time right now. The .snap is almost done thanks to Kyle, and we are very exited about how the community will think about it once it’s done. More on that in another post.
Now you know a little bit more on what’s going on. We will try to write a post again soon. The Production VM is about to be built from scratch again with some more security added and improved scripts, so stay tuned for more.