Interacting with the Linode Server

The following information is out-of-date, but kept for historical reference.

The Galapagos/Linode/Play server is accessible via browser here. Should you seek to ssh into the server, you should ask Jason to create an account for you. After that, the host that you will ssh into will be the following: li425-91.members.linode.com. (A nicer name may be forthcoming.)

After sshing in, you'll probably want to connect to the primary Play server. You are asked not to launch additional Play instances, though, since this Linode instance isn't exactly a beast of mythological proportions. Instead, you should only really interact with the server that runs on port 9000. Please access the server directory by switching to the galapagos user - sudo su - galapagos. Switching users will put you in /usr/local/Galapagos, the galapagos user's home directory, where the Galapagos code is located.

If you wish to view the server's log file, you can find it at ./target/universal/stage/logs/application.log. For other instructions, please read the ./README.SERVER.md file. To start the server, run ./startup.sh as galapagos. To update the code, use ./update.sh <branch name>. The galapagos user's ssh key is on github in read-only mode, so pushing up changes as the galapagos user won't work.

In order to update the server to the latest code, it's generally wise to restart the machine before relaunching Play (since consecutive launchings of Play have been correlated with "out of memory" errors). In order to restart the machine, please run /usr/local/Galapagos/shutdown.sh (as the galapagos user) to safely shutdown Play, and then sudo reboot (as your user) to restart the machine.

Once the server is back online, change users to galapagos and run ./startup.sh. The ./startup.sh script runs play with nohup, so no further action is needed.

(Certainly, a lot of this could be automated by anyone who cared to do so.)