Warning

The CATMAID AMI is not currently maintained and provides an outdated version of CATMAID. Consider installing CATMAID from scratch or using a Docker image instead.

If you are interested in updating the CATMAID AMI, please let us know on the CATMAID mailing list.

Creating a CATMAID Instance on EC2

If you use Amazon’s EC2 service to host web services in the cloud, you may find it easiest to create a new EC2 instance with a running CATMAID from our new AMI (Amazon Machine Image). You can launch an EC2 instance (in the eu-west-1 zone, directly from this link or if you want to find the AMI by hand in the public images in eu-west-1, its AMI ID is: ami-ec545e98.

This AMI is based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) i386 image, backed by EBS. It will run in a “micro” instance (one of which is available in Amazon’s free tier for a year if you sign up for the first time) but for a production server you would want a faster (and more expensive) virtual machine to run CATMAID on. (The CPU throttling on Micro instances will make performance very unpredictable.)

Launching the EC2 Instance

When you launch the EC2 instance, make sure you choose a security group (or security groups) that include at least SSH (TCP port 22) and HTTP (TCP port 80).

Logging In

You should log in over SSH with the username ubuntu and specifying as your identity file the private key that you downloaded from Amazon after creating your keypair; for example:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/my-aws.pem ubuntu@whatever.compute.amazonaws.com

The ubuntu user can gain root privileges using sudo, which doesn’t require a password. The CATMAID code is owned by (and runs as) the catmaid user, so if you wish to change the code, you should switch to that user:

sudo su - catmaid

The source code is in /home/catmaid/catmaid/.

Server Configuration

The AMI is configured to use Nginx + Gunicorn; by default it is configured to use 4 synchronous worker threads, which can be changed in /etc/init/gunicorn-catmaid.conf. You can restart Gunicorn with:

sudo initctl restart gunicorn-catmaid