Getting Started with AppFog’s Command Line

AppFog provides a cloud-based hosting service for your favorite web application stack. You can get servers setup and ready for your code in under a minute using our command line tools or our web console–the choice is yours. Today, we’re going to walk through deploying a WordPress app using af, the command line interface to AppFog.

To get started, you’re going to need a beta account and af. If we haven’t already let you into our private beta, add your email to our list at appfog.com and we’ll add you in no time!

af is based on vmc, the CloudFoundry command line tool and is distributed as a RubyGem. To install af, you will need Ruby Ruby and RubyGems. If these are available, then run

$ gem install af

Now you’re ready to login!

$ af login
Email: jeremy@appfog.com
Password: *********
Successfully logged into [https://api.appfog.com]

Next, you’re going to need some code to deploy. Luckily, we have prepared a CloudFoundry-ready WordPress sample at https://github.com/phpfog/af-sample-wordpress. If git is available on your system, then run

$ git clone https://github.com/phpfog/af-sample-wordpress.git
$ cd af-sample-wordpress

If you’d rather not use git, you can download a zip archive from https://github.com/phpfog/af-sample-wordpress/downloads.

Now let’s push our code to AppFog, name it my-first-app and give it a MySQL database. First, we need to call af push to create our app and upload our code.

$ af push my-first-app --url my-first-app.aws.af.cm
Creating Application: OK
Uploading Application:
  Checking for available resources: OK
  Processing resources: OK
  Packing application: OK
  Uploading (127K): OK
Push Status: OK
Staging Application: OK
Starting Application: OK

af detected that we are pushing PHP code and staged and deployed it using Apache 2, but it still needs to connect to a database so let’s ask af to create a MySQL database and bind it to our app.

$ af create-service mysql --bind my-first-app
Creating Service [mysql-cff71]: OK
Binding Service: OK
Stopping Application: OK
Staging Application: OK
Starting Application: OK

And you’re done! You can now visit your new WP app at http://my-first-app.aws.af.cm/ (or whichever url you chose).

That’s all for now. You can learn more about af by running af help or asking a question at support.appfog.com.

Share this post

Try AppFog: The new PaaS Hackers love