Joomla! powered by Bitnami
Bitnami by VMware | 3.5.1-1 on Ubuntu 14.04.3Linux/Unix, Ubuntu 14.04.3 - 32-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Not reliable at all ! Avoid at all costs!
I am currently running 16 (SIXTEEN!!) separate Bitnami Joomla Stack Servers deployed in various Amazon accounts. . All stacks are extremely unreliable and are timing out very frequently. I find myself having to reset either MYSQL or PHP-FPM or APACHE constantly on multiple stacks at least twice per day to keep the systems happy.
This might be because i have deployed T2-MICRO instances and they have not enough resources - but i am desperately looking for another solution now - not to loose all my customers to to unreliable solutions.
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Security over functionality
I was looking for a quick way to deploy a small number of Joomla sites and thought that Bitnami's image was the solution. Unfortunately, the security is so tight that this image is all but unusable.
The first problem I ran into was that the directory ownership and permissions are configured so that Joomla will not function properly. For example, the tmp and cache are not writeable.
The next problem I had was that the default account couldn't sftp to the image. I'm not a linux guru, and I'm sure there is a better way however, I got around the problem by creating a second account and adjusting permissions.
The final straw was that, in the name of security, phpmyadmin was restricted to logins from localhost. Bitnami wanted me to create a ssh tunnel, or some such.
This may be a good image once all the permissions are adjusted, but it's far from "ready to run".
default credentials no good
Bitnami's directory structure is bad enough (I've used their LAMP for some time(, but the default credentials in bitnami's documents for their joomla version aren't any good. Waste of time.
No Luck
Created an instance, try to login Joomla admin page. read the docs default is bitnami, password is in systemlog. couldn't login, went into ssh and reset the password with bnconfig tools successfully, but still cannot login. Couldn't find online customer support, gave up and terminate instance.
Starts easy, ends miserably
This was an amazingly easy install. A few clicks and it was live. If you are planning on doing a very simple site this could be wonderful.
On the other hand I was not and quickly ran into problems. The instance has all the security settings configured as if it was a high security fully deployed site. This immediately creates problems for just about any package installation you want to do. They also do not use FastCGI and this creates its own additional layer of security issues. After weeks of having every single thing I tried to install in Joomla fail I just gave up. This was misery.
A few positive notes - Bitnami did their best to help me with issues. This is why I stuck with it as long as I did. Regrettably there was no fixing the root issues and it became easier to just start over. Also, this is the fastest way to get a Joomla instance live fast. If you don't need much it may be good for you.
Negative notes - Bitnami seems to have its own way of installing everything. Nothing was where I expected it to be. Working in the back end was alway an adventure in exploration. I wasted tons of time just figuring out where in heck they put basic install packages. They also got overly aggressive about the security. Despite this being a development server at the deploy, it was completely locked down in complete security mode. No fun to work with at all.
Perfect - you made it easy!
Thank you very much for making this a much simpler implementation.
As an AWS noob, I was having trouble getting even the LAMP stack working, let alone uploading and installing Joomla.
It was great being able to select the AMI and run an instance with everything already installed - you have really saved me a lot of time and mucking around.
Thank you again!
Cam
Awesome!
This is awesome product!!! It's really easy to install! I have only one trouble: during installing on 32-bit Amazon Machine Image I should accept a user aggreement terms, but accept button is invisible, instead of it I saw "Continue" button. I have no this problem on "64-bit Amazon Machine Image".