loading...empty;done;/contentbox-clustering/:-uriContentBox CMS Clustering | iNET.elastic Dev Docs

ContentBox Clustering

ContentBox is an open-source modular content management engine for professionals. It is used for building the complicated web applications as well as blogs, websites, wikis, etc. This CMS is powered by the open source CFML engine named Railo, which you can deploy to any Java application server.

In this instruction we will show how to get the ContentBox hosting with the platform and configure the rapid and scalable caching with embedded Railo CFML cluster cache and Memcached system.

In the following cluster implementation we will use the session replication via Memcached. We’ll get the shared clustered cache, where all the sessions are stored and simultaneously are available for all the servers in the cluster. See the scheme below:

contentbox clustering cluster scheme.jpg

Cluster will consist of two application server nodes with ContentBox deployed, which will be connected to one MySQL database. The Memcached node between them will be used for scaling out and storing a great amount of data and memory.

So, let’s get started.

Create Environment

1. Log in to the platform dashboard.

2. Press the Create environment button in order to open the Environment Topology wizard.

3. Select two instances of TomEE application server, pick MySQL as a desired database to work with and Memcached node as a cache storage. Set up the amount of resources for each of these nodes within cloudlet sliders, specify the environment name and press the Create button.

contentbox clustering contentbox environment

Just in a minute your environment will be created and appear in the dashboard list. contentbox clustering contentbox hosted

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Database Configuration

1. Press the Open in Browser button next to the MySQL node.

contentbox clustering open mysql

2. While creating the environment, the platform had sent you the credentials to phpMyAdmin panel. Log in with these credentials to create the same named new user and database.

contentbox clustering contentbox mysql

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ContentBox Deployment

1. Open the ContentBox official web-site in order to download its latest version as a .war archive.

contentbox clustering download contentbox

2. Navigate back to the platform dashboard and upload the ContentBox archive within Deployment Manager.

contentbox clustering contentbox upload

3. After that deploy ContentBox to the environment you’ve created earlier.

contentbox clustering deploy contentbox

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Railo CFML Admin Passwords

It is strongly recommended to specify your own admin passwords for the embedded Railo CFML engine instead of the default ones.

1. Navigate to the Server Admin panel of the Railo CFML with the following URL format:

http://mydomain.com/railo-context/admin/server.cfm

2. Log in to the panel with contentbox password.

contentbox clustering railo log in

3. Open the Security menu located on the left side and choose the Password item:

contentbox clustering railo security

4. The opened tab gives you a possibility to specify a new administrator password and default password to all the apps, deployed on this server (Railo provides a server wide administrator and a web context administrator). Also you can enable the captcha verification on the login form in order to make sure it was submitted by human. To get the best security change both administrator password and web administrators password for all the applications.

contentbox clustering change railo password

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Cluster Configuration

1. Use this instruction to set up the Memcached session replication for your environment.

2. Log in to the Server Admin panel of the Railo CFML again (use the http://mydomain.com/railo-context/admin/server.cfm URL format) with the password you’ve specified in the previous instruction step. In the case you didn’t change the default password, use the contentbox one.

contentbox clustering server admin panel

3. Open the Extension > Applications tab within the left hand menu. Install the Railo Memcached driver (circled below):

contentbox clustering railo memcached driver

4. Then click the Services > Cache menu item in order to create a new cache connection between the Railo server and Memcached. Type the name of connection, choose the MemCache cache type in the drop-down list and click Create.

contentbox clustering create cache

5. In the next window tick the Allow to use this cache as client/session storage line and specify your connection settings. Type the IP address and port number of your environment Memcached node (open the platform dashboard and click the Info button next to it to get this info). Confirm the creation of new connection.

contentbox clustering cache ip

6. Verify the newly created connection by choosing it and clicking the appropriate button.

contentbox clustering cache connection

7. Then navigate back to the platform and press the Config button next to the TomEE app server.

contentbox clustering config tomee

8. Open the webapps directory and find the folder with deployed ContentBox application files (this folder is named as a context you’ve specified while the deployment; if you haven’t, it is named ROOT). Open the Application.cfc and enable the sessions distribution via Memcached through adding the following lines:

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this.sessionCluster = true;  
this.sessionStorage="mycache";

contentbox clustering contentbox webapps

8. Then let’s enable the ContentBox to use the same cache for distribution of content/RSS and monitoring, i.e. we’ll expand its abilities from just a distribution sessions across the cluster till using the multiple levels of content caching and RSS feeds. In order to perform this, navigate to the CacheBox.cfc file (located in the webapps/ROOT/config/ folder) and add the following definition of new cache under the caches section:

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Memcached = {  
 provider = "coldbox.system.cache.providers.RailoProvider",  
 properties = { cachename = "mycache" }  
}

contentbox clustering memcached config

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Java Agent Enabling (Optionally)

1. Extract the ContentBox archive you’ve downloaded at the very beginning and find the railo-inst.jar file in the contentbox-x.x.x.war/WEB-INF/railo/lib/ folder.

2. Click the Config button next to the TomEE server in your environment and navigate to the home folder in the opened configuration manager. Upload the railo-inst.jar library to this folder.

contentbox clustering railo install

3. Then navigate to the server > variables.conf file and specify the path to the railo-inst.jar library in it. To know the right path use the document with TomEE variables.

contentbox clustering railo variable

4. Save the changes you’ve performed for both TomEE nodes and restart them.

contentbox clustering restart tomee

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ContentBox Installation

1. Press Open in Browser next to your environment. The ContentBox installation window will be opened.

contentbox clustering open contentbox

2. Specify the data source connection within Railo Administrator password you’ve set, and MySQL user/database, which you’ve created earlier.

contentbox clustering contentbox installation

Note: If you haven’t changed the default password, it remains the same, contentbox.

3. Verify that all the fields are filled correctly and submit the creation of the data source. After that ContentBox will prompt you for your ContentBox administrator user, site information, mail and rewrite settings.

Note: In the opened window of rewrites installation choose the ContentBox Express item in the dropdown list because deployed ContentBox .war archive contains the in-built rewrite engine.

4. Finally, let’s designate the Memcached as a content and RSS feeds storage. Open the top menu in the ContentBox and navigate to the System > Settings section. Then go to the Content Options tab located on the left side. Find the Content Cache Provider drop-down list and change the selected item from TEMPLATE to Memcached.

contentbox clustering caching settings

5. Then you can go to the RSS Options tab and specify the same configuration for RSS Feeds caching.

contentbox clustering rss caching

That’s all the configurations! Now you can distribute your sessions, managed content objects and RSS feeds with the clustered ContentBox hosting.

What’s next?