Updating Statamic on AWS

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

For this blog I use Statamic, a very nice website CMS bassed on Markdown and using flat files which makes it perfect for the way I work in that I can link a Drop box account to the cheap AWS server I use for hosting and then edit blogs via mobile on a wide variety of machines with just a test editor.

Anyway the site has been rock solid for ages (5500+ hours) when I suddenly realised I wanted to upgraded the Statamic version to take advantage of some new features, that’s an easy job, you just replace a couple of directories in the httpd WWW directory, but I got a couple of errors and realised that I had an old version of PHP53 on the server and I had not patched it for a while (wince). also it had been so long since I had even logged on to the box that I could not remember what to do, so this is just an aide-memoire for those in the same situation

as I’m on Linux you need to make sure your AWS pem is secure sooo

sudo chmod 644 serverkey.pem

Then connect to the box with SSH

ssh -i serverkey.pem ec2-user@XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

Now first things first, lets do a full update

sudo yum update

Once that is done, we have to remove http and php to update them all (yes you will get an outage)

sudo yum remove php httpd php-cli php-xml php-common httpd-tools

This will uninstall the server its self (but not your website), lets install the new version

sudo yum install php55 php55-pdo php55-gd

If you notice I added “php55-gd” to the install as you will need this for some of the new Statamic features such as the file and gallery features. Quick start the server before anyone notices

sudo service httpd start

You will find that the site seems to work fine, but as soon as you attempt to go to a individual blog you will find it gives you a 404, this is because the htaccess files in Statamic are being ignored so you will have to go back and tell httpd to not ignore them. so you need to edit the httpd.conf file
So first lets go to the httpd config directory

[ec2-user@ip-XX-XXX-XX-XXX /]$ cd etc/httpd/conf

And edit the httpd.conf file ( a good cheat sheet to vi is [Here](http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/vi.html) )

sudo vi httpd.conf

change the instances of “AllowOverride None” to “AllowOverride All”
once that is saved you just restart httpd

sudo service httpd restart

And you should be all done.

Icon UK 2015

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

A very hectic Icon UK has just passed in a blur, leaving a hangover and a sense of satisfaction.

Tim Clark put on great display aided by a number of brave souls, with great content and facilities (ignoring the on site WIFI) and amazing after event social times.

As always the IBM community put on its best and came out with a wide variety of vendors and attendees (most of them long time friends that I get to see far too infrequently) all very positive and with fresh new ideas.

But for me the highlight of the conference was the arrival of IBM Marketing’s Penny Hill and the IBM champion manager Amanda Bauman , marketings absence has been a long bug bear and to finally meet someone and be able to offer help to and get help in return was wonderful ( so Penny or Amanda if you are reading this, I was serious about just yelling if there was anything I could do to help and I suspect that applies for a lot of the community.) I also must not forget the none marketing branches of IBM who also came out, took criticism and came back with excellent answers, well done all round.

LDC Via was taken far more seriously by attendees then in previous conferences (well it seemed so to me), with us having the highest turn out of all the vendor sessions, so much so that we ran out of Gin and Pimms (and no we did not tell people before the session that we would be serving drinks) and a good stream of people with serious questions and excellent use case scenarios, leaving use with a ton of leads to follow up and a bunch of new features to go Gold with.

No technical presentations for me this time though I did help with Tim and Femke’s presentation as well as present the Changing technologies with Gab Davis

[Chris Harris](https://twitter.com/chriscwharris) was taking the good pictures this time around and did a great one of the LDCVia team. The proper serious one will appear on the official [LDC Via](http://ldcvia.com/) blog for the event but in the mean time here is one of the silly ones.